FULL MARKS!
THIS is a thoroughly worthwhile piece of software for school
teachers with a BBC Micro. It sorts exam marks for any class of
up to 40 children in a year group.
The maximum mark can be set to any level and automatic range
checking is done.
The final lists can be printed alphabetically by year or form
as well as numerically. Simple bar charts are produced of results
and the degree of scatter of results is calculated and a "balanced"
mark presented.
It is possible to save data to tape and retrieve it again. This
obviously takes some time and I have found the program most useful
for simply processing large
lists of marks without bothering to save the data.
It will be more use in a secondary and middle school, than in
junior and infants schools.
The program is menu driven, and is easy to use. I have not succeeded
in crashing it and would consider it robust enough for those of
us who lack confidence when confronted by the micro.
There are some inconveniences. It is impossible to score zero
on a test. Well, very few youngsters ever do, but 1 wanted to
use a zero to show that someone was absent.
It would have been nice to add a few simple codes to show sickness
or an estimated mark etc., otherwise one is left with an incomplete
mark list.
This is a useful piece of simple software, and it will save
keyboard hacks all over the country several hours programming
their own mark list software.
lan Murray
