We all want to write beautiful, meaningful report comments for our students, but usually, the enthusiasm wears off and we can end up writing short, meaningless comments, or we end up trying to match the student to pre-existing texts. Using AI prompts to create end-of-term report comments can be a way to overcome this and return the focus to the student and away from grammar, spelling and mistake-avoidance. In sum, if prompted correctly, AI tools can create well-written comments. Here is a method which uses a spreadsheet to generate the prompt so that you can focus on the student and let the AI take care of the mechanics of writing.
Step 1: Decide on the key attributes you want to comment on. In the example below, they are: Personality and behaviour, Work Habits, Academic Progress and Advice. Let's call these variables. Create columns for each of these (C to F in the example).
Step 2: Write the first part of the prompt - in I2 in the example. Modify it according to your requirements. In this example, the students are all female, so that simplifies it. If not, you would need to introduce another variable for gender. Also, the school's admin system allows a merge tag [fn] which introduces the official, correctly spelled, name of the student. Again, this could be introduced as another variable if you want to put the names in column A.
Step 3: add the next components of the prompt (J2, K2 and L2)
Step 4: In cell B2 put all the components together using the CONCATENATE function, eg =CONCATENATE($I$2,C2,$J$2,D2,$K$2,E2,$L$2,F2)
Note the use of absolute values ($) so that autofill can be used if you want to generate many different prompts.
Step 5: This is the important part of the process. Enter your information about the specific student. You do not need to write full sentences. Just try to capture all the relevant ideas and information as clearly and accurately as possible. See the example in C2 to F2.
Step 6: Having entered the variable information, the prompt should now be complete in B2. Copy it and paste it into your favourite AI tool. Better still, paste it into various tools so you can compare them and learn which ones work best for you and so you can create some variation.
Step 7: Copy the generated prompt and paste it into your admin system.
