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 bemore usein a secondary and middle school, than injunior 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 I 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.

Ian Murray