Excel To The Rescue!

In February 2020, the annual Chicago Poetry Out Loud competitions happened as they had in years past. In 2021, COVID-19 changed EVERYTHING about the contest. My brother still had need of my skills because although the poetry recitations were recorded and the judges filled out their scores electronically (this year using a Google form), someone still had to add up the judges scores and produce the winners. I used Excel to do the heavy lifting of tallying up the scores. Great use case of Excel to assist with determining a winner! I look forward to 2022 and a possible return to an in person contest and continuing to work with my brother and using our talents together.

The Poetry Out Loud Sample Tally Sheet XLS file has three rounds setup as sheets at the bottom of the workbook. Besides using the Round 1, Round 2 and Round 3 tabs in the lower right, you can navigate ANY Excel Workbook with multiple sheets by typing the CTRL + PgUp keys or the CTRL + PgDn keys at the same time. Super helpful Excel tip:

You can navigate ANY Excel Workbook with multiple sheets by 
typing the CTRL + PgUp keys or the CTRL + PgDn keys at the same time.        

The spreadsheet was really well thought out. You replace [Contestant 1] - [Contestant 20] with the names of the contestants. So how does the spreadsheet save and reuse the [Contestant 1] info when you type it in?

2021 was different. We had all of the judges fill out a Google form (I did not create this or you know what I would have used!), but one of the benefits is you can download the results as an Excel file!

From there it was up to me to combine the scores (from 3 judges) for two poems each contestant recited with their accuracy score (given by the accuracy judge). I didn't go to the elaborate length of the previous spreadsheet, but just sorted on the student to get all of the scores in a section, then did the math to come up with the average score. The accuracy judge really determines this contest as the recitation has to be error free (I figured with a recording and possibly less pressure of performing the poem by memory in front of a large audience there would be fewer mistakes) and there weren't as many mistakes (missing words, adding a word, requiring a prompt, etc.) so it was less about the accuracy score than in years past.