FLINK: An Educator’s Tool for Linking Inaccurate Student Records

Abstract

Although many areas within the education sector have been subjected to digitalization, including electronic storage and processing of student information, student-administrative tasks are still often handled manually. One such task is the linking of student inaccurate information from different sources such as the task of aligning teachers grade spreadsheets with standardized exam template spreadsheets. Manual linking of records can be tedious, monotonous, and error-prone, especially in large classes with several hundred students. Although automatic robust record linking is common within other areas such as medicine, there are surprisingly few linking tools aimed at educators. The tool FLINK was therefore developed to assist with this task. FLINK was developed over a period of three years through practical experimentation and testing. This paper presents the rationale for the tool, practical use cases, and key design decisions. The tool provides a simple and flexible link between how educators interact with inaccurate student information in practice on one hand, and how they must relate to inflexible administration tools that require exact formal information on the other.