sorting student papers

A silly question for a rainy Monday:

I am teaching a class with roughly 50 students in it. They have
quizzes and homework each week, and I end up alphabetizing these
papers before I return them to the students. Some of you may be in
similar situations. My question: what technique should I use to sort
the papers? (Or maybe: what techniques do you use to sort papers in
situations like this?)

Notice that I'm not talking about writing computer code to implement
Quick Sort or something like that -- I'm talking about shuffling
actual pieces of paper around. I also have good information about the
keys on which I'm sorting: I can see how they are distributed through
the alphabet, for example, so if I want to divide them into two
roughly equal stacks, I can make a good guess about how to do that.

--
J. H. Palmieri
Gnus doesn't kill people, Emacs kills people.
.

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