Dropping test scores

[J.J. Feminella]

I'm a TA for a math class with about 300 students in it. I have an Excel
file that's being used as the gradebook. Each row corresponds to a student;
each column entry corresponds to a test or grade received by that student.
The professor recently decided to implement grade-dropping, in which the
lowest two scores are dropped and only the rest are used in computing the
student's quiz average. Is there a quick way to do this in Excel? Otherwise,
I don't relish having to manually compute 300 grades, and I'm probably going
to write a C++ program instead.

Best wishes,
JJ

 

[Harlan Grove]

...
....

The professor recently decided to implement grade-dropping, in which
the lowest two scores are dropped and only the rest are used in
computing the student's quiz average. Is there a quick way to do this
in Excel? . . .

If student names are in col A and scores in cols B through G, and you want
to average all except the lowest two, try something like

I2:
=SUM(B2:G2,-SMALL(B2:G2,{1,2}))/(COUNT(B2:G2)-2)

. . . Otherwise, I don't relish having to manually compute 300
grades, and I'm probably going to write a C++ program instead.

If you were an engineering grad student, you'd have figured to use Perl or
some other much more efficient scripting language. For that matter, Lisp or
Scheme would be better suited to this problem.