Automatic Data Joining from Multiple Spreadsheets and Automatic Total Points Calculations

Popular LMS systems, such as Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle, automatically calculate and export a total points column taking into account the specific grading policies of the course. Moreover, the exported gradebooks from these systems contain student e-mail address information. While these systems dominate the LMS market, there are a number of other LMS systems that might be used at your institution — particularly in K-12.

Joining Multiple Spreadsheets

Not all LMS systems export e-mail address information in the exported gradebook. Consider the following figure.

The gradebook contains the student names and assignments, but no email addresses However, name and email addresses can be exported as a separate file.

If uploaded simultaneously, these two spreadsheets will be joined. Instead of selecting a singe file from the computer's file system and dropping it onto the Grade Nudge interface, the user can select both the gradebook and email data file and drop both files (simultaneously) onto the Grade Nudge interface. Grade Nudge will use the names in both spreadsheets to join the data together. This feature requires that both spreadsheets have a full name column with a column labeled 'name', 'student', 'student name', or 'full name'. If the first column of the spreadsheet has a blank header, this column will be treated as the name column.

Automatic Total Points Column

If a specific gradebook file does not contain a total column, one can be generated by Grade Nudge. The above example gradebook contains assignment points, but lacks a total points column. Given this gradebook, Grade Nudge would offer a column named 'Total - Calculated by Grade Nudge (Caution)', which is the sum of all columns for each row. This feature should be used with caution; if the gradebook file contains category sums or numbers that aren't assignment totals (e.g. id numbers), the calculated total will be incorrect.