After every assessment, a teacher owes the same handful of numbers: what share passed, what share failed, and how the class actually spread out. This class pass/fail tracker produces all of them from one paste: your scores and the pass mark go in, and out come the pass and fail percentages, the mean, the median, the lowest and highest scores, and counts in five score bands. The median rides along deliberately — when it disagrees with the mean, it is telling you something about your class that the pass rate alone conceals.
What each number is for
The pass rate is the headline, but it is a cliff-edge statistic: a student one mark below the line counts exactly like one forty marks below. The bands repair that blindness — they show whether your fails are near-misses (a teaching problem with a short fix) or a lost tail (a different problem entirely). The mean summarises level; the median summarises the typical student. When the mean sits well below the median, a few very low scores are dragging the average — the typical student did better than “the average” suggests. When the mean is above the median, a few stars are flattering it. Min and max frame the spread the bands then fill in.
Worked example
Six scores — 40, 55, 60, 72, 88, 95 — with a pass mark of 50 out of 100. Passed: 5 of 6 = 83.3%; failed: 1 = 16.7%. Mean = 410 ÷ 6 = 68.3. Median = the average of the middle two (60 and 72) = 66. Lowest 40, highest 95. Bands: A (≥90) takes the 95 — 1 student; B takes 88 — 1; C takes 72 — 1; D takes 60 — 1; F takes 40 and 55 — 2. Read together: a healthy top, a middle doing its job, and a two-student tail in the lowest band — the 40, who genuinely failed, and the 55, who passed (the pass mark is 50) but sits in the F band because the bands measure share of the maximum, not the pass line. Those are different problems: one student needs rescue, the other needs stretching. That is a term’s worth of reporting from one paste.
Honest limits
The tool counts what you paste: absent students are not in the list unless you add them as zeros, and whether they belong there is a policy question (a fail and a no-show are different events with different consequences — the Spanish companion to this tool separates “not presented” counts for exactly that reason). Percentages on tiny classes swing wildly — with six students, one result is worth 16.7 points — so report small classes in counts first and percentages second. And bands are defined here as shares of the maximum score, a reporting convention: if your institution bands by its own grade boundaries, read the counts as a shape, not as official grades.
Pass/fail tracking — frequently asked questions
Should absent students count as fails? For the pass rate of those who sat the exam, no — compute it without them. For the pass rate of the cohort, yes, they belong in the denominator. Decide which question you are answering and keep the rule consistent across terms, or your trend lines are fiction.
Why show both mean and median? Because they disagree exactly when the distribution is lopsided, and that disagreement diagnoses the class: dragged-down mean = struggling tail; flattered mean = star effect. Reporting only one hides which class you actually taught.
Can I track several assessments over a term? Run the tracker per assessment and keep the outputs: pass rate, median and band shape per assessment is a compact term record, and a tail that grows across assessments is visible in it early.
What pass mark should I use? Your institution’s official one for the assessment in question — 50 and 60 are both common on a 100 scale, and 5 on a 10 scale works here too if you set the maximum to 10.
Related tools
Versión en español: Calculadora de Porcentaje de Aprobados y Suspensos de una Clase — Estadísticas rápidas para profesores · Bell Curve Grade Calculator · Weighted Grade Calculator.
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