This is an interesting example of the 'Double Up' approach; it's worth understanding the scenario before reading what this teacher actually did.
George's Assessment Plan
At the start of the year, in George's school, every teacher received an e-mail from the school office, explaining where their assessment spreadsheets were.
These were one-worksheet-per-class-spreadsheets, stored on the central school server, with six columns: one for the student names, and then student's current grade, then the student's predicted grade, then three columns for assessment data.
At the start of year, the columns for student name, current grade and predicted grade were filled in; but the three centre columns - for mid-term assessment data, were blank.
Now, George was a one-class-a-week teacher: he taught a mandatory subject, which the students studied one lesson a week. During the course of his 25 lessons a week, he therefore taught pretty-much 25 different classes - 12 in KS3.
This meant he had to create nine assessments (3 terms x 3 years) and mark 36 class-sets (3 terms x 12 classes). This was a real worry for George. The mid-term assessment dates were staggered by year-group, so not all the assessments happened at the same time each term This was good, but it meant that there were a stream of remorseless deadlines on his school calendar.
George's worry was that he might miss one of these - due to a week's sickness, due to forgetfulness, or due to pressure of work.
Here is what George did:
a) He took a copy of each spreadsheet onto his own PC, so he had a personal version under his own control.
b) He looked at the five columns with the grades (two already filled in)
c) He copied the 'current grade' column and pasted it into the column for the first (autumn-term) assessment.
d) He copied the 'predicted grade' column and pasted it into the column for the last (summer term) assessment
e) The last step was a bit fiddly, but he typed in a mythical middle (spring term) set of grades about half way between the current and predicted. Because he wasn't particularly rigorous about what 'half-way' meant, this took about two minutes per class (just keying in 30 numbers doesn't take long, agonising over the numbers does).
For George's 12 classes, this whole exercise took about 45 minutes at the start of term. A waste of time? Think about it:
a) This exercise took no skill whatsoever, George could do it at a time when he wasn't really feeling like doing anything creative or energetic.
b) In the event of anything nasty happening to George (sprained ankle, virus, whatever), then grades can easily be copy-and-pasted into the school-version-spreadsheet - two minutes work.
c) George has a pre-prepared way of comparing the actual assessment results with his notional expectation (because George will do whatever is necessary to prepare, carry out and mark all the assessments).
d) George can pretty much stop worrying. He is in control of the situation. For 95% of his mid-term assessments he will deliver a professional set of marks. For the other 5%, he can simply review and edit the notional-expectation grades, and copy-and-paste them