Here comes the worst part of report cards. .

Getting the sad realization that you didn't do so well on your report card as you were hoping, is bad enough, but having to calculate your marks after it is even worse! You sit there and wonder how you can make up your marks for second and third term so you can reach your goals successfully. Well here's an easy way you can do that. Today we learned how to calculate our average for first term, what our goals are for third term and what grades we need to get to achieve our goal for term three. Excel is easy, if you know what you want to figure out. For example, today we learned to do things backwards. So we have an answer but we want to find out the question. Chose three columns, and at the top of each one write your term. (Term one, term two, term three.) Write your subjects in a column before your term one column. In that, going down, write all your subjects. Since you know all your subjects for term one, write them in. Now make a new column right after term three and in the heading write 'Goals'. In there, write all the marks you'd like to get for term three, and keep them realistic! Using a formula, you take the mark of your goals for the first subject [eg. F4 ] and multiply that by three. Subtract that from your term one mark and what ever you have left, divide it by two. And that will give you the mark you need for term two in order to achieve your goal. Now the great thing about excel is that once you've got a formula in one column, you can simply drag the number in your first row down and it will automatically calculate the marks you need for your other subjects. The easy thing about excel is that because you have used a formula, if you make a mistake or you want to change your marks, you can change one thing and excel automatically changes everything for you. After all that hard work, you want to check if your formula is correct, what you can do is make a dummy row at the bottom and drag your first number down (with the formula) because once you have a formula for one number, you can drag it and the formula will stay the same for everything else in that column. So drag it down, and if you get 100 in each row, you know you have done it right!

That's a lot to take in but once you get the hang of it, its pretty easy. So give it a shot and see what marks you need to get in order to achieve your goals!

Have fun !.

Peggy .