You know, the longer I do this job, the more ways I find to goof it up.
Today I was trying to wrap things up for my undergrads in preparation for their final exam. I finished the last of the pre-exam grading and I exported their grades from lecture and from the two lab sections. This thought flitted through my brain: "I don't know why I used to think it was hard to merge multiple lab sections." [insert foreshadowing music here: dun-dun-duuunnnnn]
I assembled the two sets of lab grades into one spreadsheet and sorted it by its first column. I pasted those grades into my lecture spreadsheet, spot-checked them, spotted a problem, fixed it, and uploaded everybody's points total into the online gradebook.
After dinner I got an email from a student saying that her points total didn't seem quite right. She was correct -- it did not make sense. But how could that have happened? Were there gremlins in my spreadsheet? Had the course management software become both sentient and malevolent?
...or...had Dr. Gladly goofed something up?
The right answer, as you have probably deduced already, was Option C. Remember that part up above where I sorted the lab grades by the first column? This was exactly the wrong thing to do. This meant [pausing my typing here for a rueful facepalm] that because of a quirk in the structure of the exported gradebook, I alphabetized the combined lab spreadsheet by the students' first initials and then pasted the grades into the lecture spreadsheet, which was alphabetized by last name. As a result, I accidentally awarded Abigail Zehenspitzen's lab points to Zoe Aardvark, and vice versa.
[please hold, your friendly neighborhood blogger will return after a bit more facepalming]
Thankfully, the result was not catastrophic. The lab sections are designed to be low-stakes settings in which to practice the things we talk about in lecture, and I want most students to get full credit for the lab portion of their grade. That's why my spot-checks didn't turn up this particular problem, because if Zoe and Abigail have the same lab grade, I'm not going to find the error by looking at their results. And by the time I had untangled a different problem, I just wanted to close my laptop and eat dinner.
Haste makes annoyance but also blog posts, that's my motto.
I think it's fixed. I am certain my students will let me know if it's not. It still doesn't seem like it should be hard to merge grades for two lab sections into a combined spreadsheet that also includes their lecture grades, but this is not the first time I have messed it up. Maybe it will be the last.
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