A Calculating Program
Hampton University professor's grade calculator keeps students, faculty on top of academic performance.     

Quo Vadis. The phrase literally means "where are you going?" It's also the name of Hampton University professor Dr. George Burbanck's innovative grade calculation program, which is saving academic careers at Hampton and winning converts at schools as far away as Nebraska.
Burbanck, chairman of Hampton's Marine and Environmental Sciences Department, began development of the program about five years ago, inspired by his work with freshmen struggling to get off of academic probation. He recalls the moment precisely: He was sitting in an auditorium full of students and faculty, listening to the director of freshman studies explain to the students how to calculate and track their grade point averages.
"And I knew perfectly well how to calculate a grade point average, but she was confusing the heck out of me," Burbanck says. "So, as I was sitting in the audience, I started jotting down a little square like a tic-tac-toe box, with multiplications and additions so that if you entered the figures in the right places, the formulas would calculate the grades for you."
The first version of the grade calculator was a paper instruction sheet filled with happy faces and directions. "Fill this box with that figure, multiply this box with that, go to the happy face and so on," Burbanck explains. He gave this version to the director of freshman studies, who was so enthusiastic about it she took it to a conference in South Carolina. She returned with plenty of feedback.
The consensus was that it was a great start, but there were problems. "You couldn't do ‘what-if' scenarios — you couldn't really play with it. And, of course, you had to have a calculator," Burbanck says.
So, over Christmas break, Burbanck sat down with his happy faces and his personal computer and started "kicking around." When he returned to campus, he took with him "Survival"— as the grade calculation program was originally called — which anyone with Microsoft Excel could navigate with ease.
The original name didn't stick, however.
"Originally, I developed it for freshmen on academic probation, and that was the attitude I thought they needed to develop," Burbanck says. "But it began to seem awfully negative."