Your task is to develop a spreadsheet to aid an instructor in exploring the effects of different grading curves on the final grades for a class. For testing purposes, the spreadsheet will be applied to the spring 2005, section 2, MIS 370 grades as posted on the course web site.

The instructor will input the cut-off for As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs. The spreadsheet will calculate descriptive statistics such as the class high score, low score, average (mean), standard deviation, and the count of the number of students. The spreadsheet must also count the number of students with a particular grade – that is, the number of As, Bs, etc. The frequency of grades will be visualized using a graph that is saved as a separate worksheet.

Remember to take into consideration the weighted grading scheme for assignments – for example, Database assignments get 15%. Also, 20% of the lowest quizzes are dropped (you can assume that the 3 lowest quizzes will be dropped). Finally, the overall exam grade is calculated two ways as stated in the syllabus for this course and the student gets the higher of the two results. Allow the instructor to easily change the weights for various assignment types.

Some Excel functions you will find useful for this assignment are:

COUNT() – counts the number of items in a series

MAX() – finds the maximum value in a series

MIN() – finds the minimum value in a series

AVERAGE() – finds the average (mean) in a series

STDEV() – finds the standard deviation in a series

SMALL(series, n) – finds the n^th lowest value in a series

IF(condition, true, false) – evaluates a condition and returns the true part if true, otherwise it returns the false part

Screen shots of one solution to this problem are depicted below.

Terms of the assignment:

• This is an individual project.
• You will turn in the following:
• Your Excel spreadsheet file.
• Your Excel file must be named using the filename conventions, see below.
• The assignment prefix is ss2
• Your spreadsheet file must be sent to me as an email attachment.
• The subject line on the email message must be: ss2 submission
• The assignment is due by Thursday, May 26, 2005.
• A 10% late penalty will be applied for each day the assignment is late.

Filename Conventions:

The filename conventions are the same as those used in previous assignments.