APPLEWORKS-MAKING THE GRADE

 

Coming from Microsoft Excel, I was a little surprised at how powerful Appleworks can be. What I need in a grade book is a way to average grades, of course, resulting in a percentage grade (like 95.0), but also turn those numeric grades into a letter grade. And it's this last part which most people don't realize Appleworks can accomplish.
   

Create a basic spreadsheet for 3 students and 6 classes. I put my dates and project descriptions across the top, and student last names and first names down the left side like this:
Feel free to alter color, boldness, alignment, etc. Note how I used a blank column to create separation between Column B and D. This is purely for personal aesthetics.

Next, enter the formulas to calculate the grades. If you need to weight the grades (homework weighted differently from tests, for example), then add that into your formula. I used Appleworks' AVERAGE formula-

=AVERAGE(D4..I4)

and put it into the cell under FINAL % for each student (put it in K4, then copy and paste K4 to K5 and K6-it will automatically get the right grades from each row.

Note how some of the numbers have crazy decimal places when all we really want is 2 places. Choose all the cells you want to change to 2 decimal places, then choose the FORMAT MENU/NUMBER and set it for FIXED-2 places.
Now your grades should look like this:

Now it's time to put in the formula for changing percent grades to letter grades.
To do this, you need to use Applework's IF() function.

Basically the way "IF" works is similar to the way that programming languages use it. According to Applework's own documentation:

IF evaluates an expression and returns one of two possible results".
It's format is like this:

=IF(logical,true value, false value)

In a nutshell, whatever the expression you use in place of the word "logical" (for example, is cell K4>95?), if it evaluates to true, do the first thing, if it evaluates to false, do the second thing.

The cool thing here and the thing that allows multiple comparisons, is if the expression is false, you can insert another expression, such as this:

=IF(K4>=95,"A",IF(K4>=90,"A-")
which says "If cell K4 is greater than or equal to 95, display an "A" grade, else (the false part) if cell K4 >= 90, display an "A-" grade". This can actually keep going for a long time, which leads us to our final formula:

=IF(K4>=95,"A",IF(K4>=90,"A-",IF(K4>=85.01,"B+",IF(K4=85,"B",IF(K4>=80,"B-",
IF(K4>=75.01,"C+",IF(K4=75,"C",IF(K4>=70,"C-",IF(K4>=65.01,"D+",IF(K4=65,"D",
IF(K4>=60,"D-","F")))))))))))
which looks really scary, but all you're doing is creating a false return for every situation by inserting a new IF test.

Now if you look carefully at this again:

 =IF(K4>=95,"A",IF(K4>=90,"A-")

you may ask-

"Wait, you test for greater than or equal to 95, then you test for greater than or equal to 90? Isn't 95 greater than or equal to 90? Wouldn't this give me an "A" instead of the desired A-?"

Well, after IF evaluates the K5>=95 part, it sort of ignores that, it's done with it, it's outta here. So the test for greater than or equal to 90 is safe because it has already evaluated the K5>=95 and it isn't part of the equation at that point.
So anyway, here again is the formula for setting up letter grade equivalents to percentage grades:
=IF(K4>=95,"A",IF(K4>=90,"A-",IF(K4>=85.01,"B+",IF(K4=85,"B",IF(K4>=80,"B-",
IF(K4>=75.01,"C+",IF(K4=75,"C",IF(K4>=70,"C-",IF(K4>=65.01,"D+",IF(K4=65,"D",
IF(K4>=60,"D-","F")))))))))))

(I had to break it up into multiple lines, but you should enter it as one long scary formula)
Just plop that down in the LETTER GRADE column for each student and you get automatic letter equivalents:

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