How to organise your students’ grades in Excel before the school year
Before the year starts, spend ten minutes organising your Excel gradebook. A little structure up front saves hours of searching and fixing later.
1. Make the matricule the key
Never match on student names. A name can repeat within the same class, be spelled differently, or change. The matricule is unique to each student and should be the only thing you rely on for searching, matching, or updating.
2. Fix the three component columns from the start
Grading in Algerian schools is out of 20 across three components: continuous, test, exam. Create those columns in the first sheet and don’t reorder them afterwards — every later calculation (average, ranking, final result) refers to them.
3. One sheet per class and subject
Don’t stack several classes into one sheet. A clear sheet name (class + subject + year) makes finding it six months later a matter of seconds instead of guesswork.
4. Keep a weekly backup
One copy on the device is not enough. Save a weekly copy somewhere else — a cloud drive or an external disk — and name it with its date. If the file breaks or a cell is deleted, you lose a week at most, not a month.
5. Stick to the ministry template
Ministry workbooks in .xlsx and .xls are the reference format for importing: column order and formatting are known to the app, and a custom layout of your own may fail to import later.
When you want to stop typing grades by hand
That’s where Nuktah comes in: import the class file once to create students and classes, photograph the handwritten grade sheet to extract the grades, review every line matched against the matricule, and nothing is saved until you approve it. Then export a PDF report or an updated Excel file.