adi, thanks for your input !

the way it is set up now is that each student has their own spreadsheet. i have all the equations set to go such that at the end of each week i am able to get a score for each class (about 6) and then their total weighted average for the week. each of these scores then goes into a 'master' table where the column is each class and the rows are each student. i'm not summing across anything at this point, it's just getting the scores from a bunch of different sheets to one master sheet. to make matters a little more complicated, not all students are taking the same number of classes...