How to assign students to groups in a large class

At thirty students you can just about sort teams by hand. At two hundred, the spreadsheet that worked once becomes a source of errors: you lose track of who is placed, you cannot see who has no shared availability, and a single late enrolment means reworking half of it.

The problem is not effort, it is that the data you need to form good teams, availability and skills and preferences, is not on a class list at all.

The step that makes large-class grouping tractable is a short formation survey. Ask for the few things that change who ends up with whom, when students are free, what they can do, who they want to work with, and gather it in one place instead of chasing it later.