Grade Calculator

List each graded item on its own line with a name, the grade and its weight. Weights can be percentages of the course, such as 20 for a project worth 20%, or the points each item is worth if the course is graded on total points. Grades can be percentages, letters, or a mix of the two. The calculator multiplies each grade by its weight, adds the results and divides by the total weight, so a 20% project moves the average four times as much as a 5% homework set. With the sample entries, a 90 worth 5%, a B worth 20% and an 88 worth 20% give a weighted average of 86.67%, a B.

Final grade planning answers the question students ask most: what do I need on everything that is left? Enter the goal and the weight of the remaining work. The calculator assumes the finished work keeps its weight and solves for the average the rest must reach. Most US schools convert percentages to letters on a scale like the one below; check your syllabus, because cut-offs vary.

Brief history of different grading systems

Formal grades are a fairly recent invention. For centuries, universities judged students through oral examinations and public disputations, and the outcome was simply a pass or a ranking of the candidates. Cambridge University's Mathematical Tripos, which from the 18th century ranked students by their written exam results, is often cited as an early step toward numeric scoring.

In the United States, Yale recorded students in four descriptive classes in the 1780s, and over the 19th century colleges experimented with scales of 4, 9, 20 and 100 points. Mount Holyoke College is usually credited with an early letter scale in the late 1890s, which at first included an E before F. Letters spread through high schools and colleges in the early 20th century, helped by the growth of standardized record keeping, and the A to F scale with a 4.0 grade point average became the dominant American system by the middle of the century.

Other countries took different routes: Germany grades from 1 (best) to 6, France uses a 20-point scale on which 16 is already excellent, and many British universities award degree classifications such as first and upper second class honours.

An alternative to the letter grading system

Letter grades compress a semester of learning into one symbol, and critics argue they reward compliance and test taking more than mastery. They also vary between teachers and schools, a problem made worse by grade inflation: the average GPA at US colleges has risen steadily for decades, so an A carries less information than it once did.

One alternative is standards-based grading, which reports progress on specific skills, often on a four-level scale from beginning to exceeding the standard, rather than averaging everything into a single mark. Students can see exactly which skills need work, and later evidence of mastery replaces earlier attempts instead of being averaged with them.

Other approaches include narrative evaluations, in which instructors write a paragraph about each student's work, as some colleges have done for decades; pass/fail or credit/no-credit grading, which lowers pressure in exploratory courses; and portfolios that collect a student's best work over time. Contract grading, in which students agree in advance on the work required for each grade, is another option some instructors use. Each approach trades the convenience of a single comparable number for richer feedback, and many schools combine them, keeping letter grades for transcripts while using more detailed feedback in the classroom.

Frequently asked questions