From Excel Hell to Teaching Heaven: How One Computer Science Department Saved 15 Hours a Week on Test Analysis

Some problems in schools are loud. Behaviour issues, staffing gaps, timetable chaos. Others are quieter, but far more persistent. They don’t interrupt your day—they fill it.

For me, that problem was test analysis in a computer science department.

After every assessment, the process was the same. Export marks from one system. Copy in results from another. Try to line up question-level data across multiple classes. Work out whether “Q3” in one test was really the same skill as “Q4” in another. Fix formatting. Recheck totals. Hope nothing broke.

It wasn’t difficult work. It was just relentless.

Between programming tasks, written papers, and auto-marked quizzes, the data never arrived in a consistent shape. Every assessment cycle meant rebuilding the same structure from scratch. Spreadsheets multiplied. Versions drifted. And no matter how careful you were, there was always that lingering doubt—is this actually right?

Across the department, we were easily losing 12–15 hours a week to it.

Not analysing. Not improving teaching. Just preparing data so we could do those things.

And that was the turning point.

Because once the data was ready, the insights came quickly. Students who could write code but couldn’t trace it. Strong syntax recall, weak problem-solving. Misconceptions that repeated across classes, but only became obvious when you could actually see the pattern.

The thinking wasn’t the problem. The system around it was.

So I built something to fix that.

Otter Academics started as a way to remove the friction we’d quietly accepted as normal. Instead of wrestling spreadsheets into shape, the idea was simple: assessment data should arrive ready to think with.

Upload a file. Map questions once. Let the structure stay consistent.

That meant results from different classes—and even different types of assessment—could sit side by side without manual intervention. Question-level analysis became immediate, not something you earned after an hour of cleaning data. Patterns surfaced quickly: by topic, by skill, by student.

And just as importantly, the data became something you could trust.

The impact wasn’t dramatic in a single moment. But over a few assessment cycles, the change was obvious.

The time spent on spreadsheets dropped away.

Department meetings shifted. Less “has everyone filled this in correctly?” and more “why are students struggling with this concept?” Conversations became sharper because they were based on something stable. Interventions became more targeted because the patterns were clearer.

Across the department, we reclaimed those 15 hours a week.

But that number doesn’t quite capture it.

What really changed was how assessment felt.

It stopped being an administrative burden sitting on top of teaching, and became part of the teaching process again. Less about managing data, more about understanding students—how they think, where they get stuck, and what to do next.

That’s the origin of Otter Academics. Not a top-down idea, but a response to a very specific, very familiar problem.

Because “Excel hell” was never really about Excel.

It was about time, attention, and all the small inefficiencies that quietly get in the way of good teaching.