How to assign students to groups in a large class

Why the spreadsheet breaks down

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.

Collect the inputs once, up front

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.

Form on the data, then review

With structured inputs in hand, forming balanced teams across two hundred students is a matter of applying the same rules consistently: spread skills, keep sizes even, honour a reasonable number of preferences. The part that still needs a human is the review, checking the handful of teams that look off before students see them.

Plan for churn

In a large cohort, students drop, add, and swap tutorials for weeks. Assume it. Whatever process you use should let you rework one affected team without rebuilding the whole arrangement, and keep a record of what changed.