Marking Shell

This is the "shell" referred to on the Marking page of the Teaching site. It is intended in part to take some of the really boring slog out of marking, but more importantly also to make it easier to provide informative feedback to students.

I fear that you need Microsoft Office 97 or later (for Windows � I don't know whether it will work for the Mac) [all trademarks acknowledged, blah,blah...] because it consists of two linked files � one Excel file to contain the data, and another Word file to process it. There is also a short "manual" in Acrobat format, and a further Word file for handwritten data entry before transfer to the machine.

As presented, the spreadsheet can handle:

• 150 students

• 6 assignment titles

• 7 criteria, each scored 1-5

• 12 standard individual comments, of which up to six can appear on each report sheet

• Write-in individualised comments.

The link below is to a self-extracting archive (610 kb), which will decant the files in your Windows\Temp folder by default. In practice, however, you may prefer to put them in My Documents\My Data Sources, because this is where the Word merge file looks for data by default. I can't target that folder for you because the route varies from machine to machine. (The above relates to Windows XP; MS have messed with Office so much in the Vista versions that I have no idea what is happening.)

Shell_v4.exe

Note that this is all pretty crude and not secure for the storage of assessment data: I accept no responsibility for anything nasty happening as a result of using it, but if you can improve it, please do so and I will post the revised version with full credits, here.