sort by last name

Hi Kourtney,

Unfortunately, it is not currently possible to directly sort students by last name. The teaching tools use the students' display names to sort the list of students, and since the display name consists of one single data field (rather than a separate field for first and last name), it isn't possible for the system to sort based on last names.

However, there are a few workarounds for this:

• If you don't have that many students, you can visit your Students page and then change their display name to "Last, First" in order to enable alphabetical sorting by last name.
• Alternatively, if you have a lot of students you can have them go to their Account Settings and change their own display name to "Last, First", which will automatically update their name on your teacher dashboard.

Hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any further questions!

Sometimes I want to sort by first name and sometimes I want to sort by last name.  I use first name for interacting with students in class and last name for grading.  I appreciate that the coding is not currently supporting a sorting feature.  I will take advantage of having the students edit their screen names to make grading a better option when using KA.  I have 171 students.

Hi Kourtney,

While it's not possible to sort by the last name, I completely understand how sorting alphabetically by the last name would make the Teacher Dashboard easier to navigate. Which is why I have gone ahead and sent your message to our development team so they can review it as they plan for the future of Khan Academy!

Thank you so much for your feedback!

Best,

This request was made 8 months ago.  My students are >13 so I can't change their settings to sort by last name.  This is absolutely ridiculous that KA hasn't been able to change the coding to allow sorting of students.  It makes recording assignment grades very cumbersome.  

Hi Jessica,

As I mentioned in my first comment, one option is to have your students edit their own display names to follow a "Last, First" format.

Alternatively, you can edit how their names are displayed in your gradebook (different from completely changing their display names). To do this, please visit the Students page. If you hover over a student, you should see an "Edit display name" button appear at the far right, which will allow you to alter their display names.

I hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

I wish the people at Khan understood that those of us working in districts with high mobility rates need to sync with Google classroom weekly, we cannot change the display names of 150 students every week!  Whenever I try to ask about this I get the same answer, change the display name.  PLEASE listen to us!!!

Evan Lewis, I have 195 students.  Who has time to do that?  I'm with Maribeth.  It's a simple coding issue on the part of KA but instead, let's ask the teachers who are already working 60+ hours a week to physically change the names of all of their students. Great idea. 

Thank you!  It is great that Khan syncs with Google classroom but I am not sure that the people at Khan understand that in urban districts our students move often and we need to sync weekly.  Thus we would override the display name every week.