View Single Post
  #4   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.misc
Mike Mike is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3,101
Default Average Grade for Letters

Andreah,

Averaging of the ASCII codes for the letters A to U give a biased result
towards U grades (presumably U means un-graded) because it has an ASCII code
of 117 campared for A to F which have codes in the range 97 to 102. As an
example 1 U grade and 8 A grades gives and average of C but 1 F grade and 8 A
gives an average of A.

To get an anawer that represents reality I think what you need to do is
assign values to grades (not ASCII codes) and average these.

An excellent explanation can be found here, complete with example workbook.

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/teaching/grades.html

Mike

"andreah" wrote:

I have a column of values which are all grades A to U and I would like to
work out the Average of that column but can only figure out how to average
numbers. Is there anyway of averaging a column of letter values?