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The Sort macro that I described (J. Chem.
Educ. 1993, 70, 148) is not limited to dropping the lowest
two grades. The macro merely orders each student's
N quiz grades in descending order, so that the user of
the spreadsheet can conveniently sum the highest
M grades.
In my version of record-keeping, I use a zero to
indicate an actual score on a quiz, and a blank to
indicate an absence. I find this to be a useful distinction.
The macro approach arranges the scores in descending
order, so that when the lowest grades are "lopped off",
it doesn't matter whether they are zeros or absences.
The SMALL function, on the other hand, is like the
AVERAGE function: it considers only the cells containing
entries. It finds the smallest value(s) in the cell
containing entries, and ignores the blank cells. Thus the
above approach, if applied to my records, would not give
the desired result.
But certainly, for users who adopt a different
system, using the SMALL function may provide a
compact and convenient way to handle the "best
M out of N" quiz grade problem.
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