Reputation: 11
Context: I teach at a university with mostly monolingual, English-speaking teachers, and students with mostly Russian and Kazakh names.
I want to create a simple form (like this https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zo0vSfrH-xIosENy1wVjOd_VvPL5LL6UX6g4VqIPFn0/viewform ) that would keep track of reports of plagiarism on a Google Sheet (like this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h2nAvCq31xumi4SvjMvWWp8RR7ppJ_NtLCiuvrLqVkc/edit?usp=sharing )
Having the English speaking teachers type in Russian and Kazakh names would likely lead to mistakes. There are too many students at the university to choose them from a drop-down menu, and would be too many teachers and courses to create separate Google Forms for all of them, or to use Google's branching page choices (it would require creating hundreds of pages). So I would like instructors to be able to type in the Student ID # and their own Instructor ID #, and then have some way to verify that they have typed that information in correctly (so we don't have the wrong students being penalized, or penalties that don't get assigned to any student at all).
Questions: 1. Is there any possible way (via scripting, an add-on, etc.) to have Google Forms take the Student ID from Page 1, then look up the student's name on the Student Info tab of the Google Sheet and insert it into the text field on the second page of the Google form, so the instructor can verify it's the correct student? (Or any other technique anyone can think of that would allow a Google Form user to verify that they had entered the correct data, or help manage the massive number of choices of students in a university of several thousand students.)
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Upvotes: 1
Views: 4395
Reputation: 841
If you are open to doing it differently I'd go this route...
1) Use a short answer box and allow edits to answers.
2) Put the onSubmit() trigger into the sheet. When a submission comes in, send a follow up email to the person with the ID that they typed and the student name that it corresponds to. Let them know that no action is required if that is correct. If it isn't correct, they should edit their response with the edit response link which you can get using getEditResponseUrl(). I'd call it done right here and only worry about additional features if they are needed. It isn't as ideal as verifying at the time but would get the same thing done for people that can't keep their IDs straight. :-)
3) But... if you have people that keep messing up and they don't fix their issues or whatever, add a link in the email to confirm that the entry is accurate. If it isn't then a weekly/daily task runs that deletes any entries that haven't been confirmed and are older than Y days.
4) Alternately, instead of verifying what they type, give them drop down lists made up of a combination of student ID and name. I'd have multiple lists, depending on the number of active students. One or many though, make a script in the sheet that updates the dropdowns in the form either on edit or by manually running the script, either from a menu item or by attaching it to an icon on the page where the IDs/names are at. They should see 12345 - Joe Smith as the option and can find the right one if that student name doesn't match the ID they thought they should use.
I have a script like #4 that I use to populate a form with updated products whenever the list changes. I tied it to a big red button JPG to help the end users remember to run it when they change something, as a menu option didn't work and running every time there was an edit was too much.
If you list of students/IDs also includes the teachers/classes/etc you could even do custom forms for each staff member that uses the form that only populates their students. Not sure how many staff you have so that might not be practical. Though again, once you have the script and the data is accurate, updates are a single click.
Upvotes: 1