Grade Calculator

Percentage score and letter grade for an assessment.

Institutions differ in how they treat plus and minus grades, repeated courses and pass-fail credits, so two transcripts with identical letters can produce different numbers. Class rank and test scores sit alongside the grade average in most admissions files.

American grades convert to a 4.0 scale — an A is 4, a B is 3 — weighted by course credits, with a failing grade earning nothing. Transcripts carry both a term GPA and a cumulative figure, and weighted high-school scales can push past 4.0 for advanced courses while unweighted scales cap at it.

A single course moves a cumulative GPA less the further into a degree it comes, because the divisor has grown.

Averages are weighted by credit, so one difficult course moves a cumulative figure less than a weak semester does. Admissions offices commonly recalculate on their own unweighted scale, which normalises the inflation that differing school weighting systems introduce.

Grade Calculator sits with the rest of the library's everyday work, and it rests on the same academic-record arithmetic the way a manufacturer's label or a timetable does. Its answer is only as good as the assumptions standing behind it.

The quantities it works from — points earned, points possible and target grade — are the ones a real academic-record question actually turns on, and each carries a convention of its own, set out below.

Everyday arithmetic in the United States carries conventions that are easy to miss: dates run month before day, distances and weights follow customary units, and prices are quoted before tax. Those conventions make a surprising share of daily sums come out differently from the same question asked elsewhere.

The figures in this section follow American practice unless the subject itself is international.