Although using a FOR loop isn't the most effective method, since you can't use nansum, something like this may work:
% set-up some data
n = 5;
grades = randn(n,16);
grades(randi(n,1,3),randi(16,1,4)) = NaN;
finalScore = zeros(n,1);
for idx = 1:n
tempGrades = grades(idx,~isnan(grades(idx,:)));
finalScore(idx,1) = sum(tempGrades);
end
The end result is a column vector containing the point totals for each student.
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data = xlsread('filename.xls');
and then find the dimensions of the data matrix:
[nr nc] = size(data);
and you can then substitute in nr (the number of rows) for n in the above code. As you said before, nc should always be 16, so you don't necessarily need to use this.
