What-If Grade Calculator

How to use this what-if grade calculator

Pick Total points if your gradebook is a running tally of points earned out of points possible, or Weighted % if each category carries a set percentage of the course. The rows behave the same way in both.

Type what you already have into the Actual column, and put the score you want to test in the What-if column beside it. You only fill in a what-if box for rows you are actually changing. Everything else keeps its real score, which is what keeps the comparison honest.

Three things here that a plain calculator will not do for you:

• Leave Actual empty and the row becomes work that has not been graded yet, including an assignment your teacher has not added to the gradebook at all.
• Tick Drop to see the grade without that item, which is how you check what a dropped-lowest rule would really be worth to you.
• Turn on Count ungraded work as zero to see the grade your school would post if the term ended tonight and nothing else got marked.

The three figures under the rows update as you type. Your real grade sits on the left, the hypothetical one in the middle, and the gap between them on the right, so you never have to do the subtraction yourself. It works the same on a phone as on a computer, and the same for a high school class as a college course, because the arithmetic does not care. Parents checking a portal can use it exactly as a student would.

What a what-if grade calculator actually does

A what-if grade calculator answers one question: if this score were different, what would my grade be? It touches nothing official. Nothing you type on this page reaches your school, your teacher, or your transcript.

The grade what-if calculators built into learning platforms offer three moves, and this page gives you all three at once instead of one at a time. You can change a score that is already there. You can remove an item and see the grade without it. And you can invent an assignment that does not exist in the gradebook yet, which is the one people reach for most, usually in the week before a final.

The built-in versions make you give up your baseline to use them. Canvas replaces your total with the hypothetical one. Aeries updates the figure pinned to the top of the screen. Either way the number you wanted to compare against has quietly gone. And where an outside calculator does show both, it usually lets you predict from a single value, the final exam score. Here every row carries its real score and your test score side by side, so you can build a whole scenario at once and still see the difference from where you started.

One assignment, three very different courses

The tool loads with a gradebook that has four marked items and one that has not been graded yet.

That is 195 points out of the 210 marked so far, so the actual grade reads 92.86%. The final exam is worth another 100 points and has no score attached, which is precisely the situation the what-if column exists for.

Put a 70 in the what-if box on the final and the grade lands at 85.48%, a fall of 7.37 points. Put a 0 there instead and it drops to 62.9%, down 29.95. Same four marked scores, same student, and the distance between an A and a D sitting in one empty box.

The Drop checkbox tells a different kind of story. Tick it on the lab report, that spotless 40 out of 40, and the grade slides from 92.86% to 91.18%. Losing your best score costs 1.68 points here. Losing the final costs almost thirty. That is the whole argument for checking rather than guessing. If what you want to know is how much your grade will go up, one good score late in the term rarely raises it as far as people hope, and one zero can do far more damage than any single assignment seems to deserve. The Change figure puts a number on that impact instead of leaving you to feel it out.

The formula behind the numbers

Two formulas, depending on how your class is graded. A points gradebook simply adds up:

The example above is 195 divided by 210, times 100, which gives 92.86%. Add the final exam at 70 and it becomes 265 ÷ 310 × 100, or 85.48%.

A weighted gradebook multiplies each score by its weight instead:

Dividing by the sum of the weights rather than by 100 is the part worth understanding. Say homework is 15% of the course and sitting at 88, quizzes are 20% at 94, and the midterm is 25% at 81, with a 40% final still to come. Only 60 weight points have been earned so far. Divide by 100 and you get 52.25%, which is nonsense. Divide by 60 and you get 87.08%, which is where you actually stand. Give that final a what-if score of 95 and the full 100 weight comes into play: 90.25%, up 3.17 points, and a B turns into an A.

What the letters mean

The calculator starts on whole letters and the toggle at the top switches it to plus and minus grades. Both scales are below, so you can see which side of a cutoff your what-if number lands on.

This page assumes 60% as the passing mark, and a course can require a C to count toward a major. Your handbook decides where the cutoff sits, not this page. That matters most when a what-if score lands within a point of a boundary, which is exactly when people come looking for a calculator.

Does your LMS already have a what-if tool?

Sometimes. It depends entirely on which platform your school runs, which is why so many people end up searching for a what if grade calculator in the first place: their own gradebook does not offer one. Here is what each vendor’s documentation says, checked in August 2026.

Two things can take the feature away even when your platform has it. Administrators can switch the Aeries what-if option off for a whole district, and Canvas states plainly that your instructor may restrict you from seeing your current or final grade at all. If either applies to you, an outside calculator is the only way to run the numbers.

Canvas and Webcourses

Webcourses is the University of Central Florida’s name for Canvas, so a webcourses what-if grade calculator is Canvas’s What-If scores wearing a local badge. Open Grades, type a score into an assignment row, and the total in the sidebar updates. Instructure’s student guide confirms you can test a score on an assignment that already has one, or on an assignment that has yet to be graded. A Revert to Actual Score button puts it back, and a Show Saved What-If Scores checkbox brings back everything you have tried in that course.

Aeries

The what-if grade calculator in Aeries lives in the mobile portal app. Tap the pencil icon in the Class Summary and a blue banner tells you what-if mode is on. From there Aeries documents three actions: editing a score, dropping an assignment, and adding one your teacher has not entered. One warning in their own material is worth repeating, which is that dropping a what-if assignment you created yourself is permanent and cannot be recovered.

Schoology, Brightspace and Blackboard

Schoology’s what-if grades are not really Schoology’s. They come from Schoology Plus, an independent browser extension, whose own documentation notes that every edit disappears the moment you reload the page. For Brightspace, D2L’s material covers showing students how a released final grade was calculated, not testing hypothetical ones. Blackboard’s help describes opening the overall grade to see how it was worked out, with no what-if feature beside it. Absence from the documentation is not quite proof, so have a look in your own portal, but if you cannot find it there is a fair chance it is not there.

Points gradebooks and percentage gradebooks

Two schools can hand you identical scores and post different grades, because they count them differently.

A points gradebook treats every point as equal. A 100 point final matters five times as much as a 20 point homework because it carries five times the points, and nobody has to decide that in advance. A percentage gradebook fixes the shares up front instead: homework is 20% of the course whether it turns out to be one assignment or thirty. Canvas calls those buckets assignment groups, and the percentage attached to each one is its category weight. Whatever your platform calls them, the shares are set for the whole semester or quarter on the first day.

Your syllabus will tell you which one you are dealing with. A list of categories with percentages next to them means weighted. A total points figure for the term means points. If a what-if grade calculator with percentages is what you came for, switch the tool to Weighted % and the columns change from points earned and points possible to a score and a weight.

Getting this backwards is the most common reason a calculator disagrees with a gradebook. Entering weights into a points calculator, or points into a weighted one, produces an answer that is arithmetically fine and completely irrelevant.

Why your what-if number can differ from your LMS

The biggest cause by a distance is ungraded work: assignments still sitting unsubmitted, or handed in and not yet marked. Canvas shows your current grade from marked work only, and unticking its Calculate based only on graded assignments box recalculates the total as though every unmarked item had scored zero. Those two numbers can sit thirty points apart, exactly as they do in the example above where 92.86% becomes 62.9%. Neither one is wrong. They answer different questions, and the toggle on this page does the same job. If your teacher has already entered zeros for missing assignments, your gradebook is showing you the unticked version whether you asked for it or not.

After that it is usually a rule the calculator cannot see. A dropped lowest quiz will not appear unless you tick Drop yourself. Extra credit awarded outside the weights lifts a grade in ways a straight weighted average never reproduces. Canvas can also split a year into grading periods and show you only the current one, so figures covering the whole year will not line up with it.

Then there is rounding, which causes more arguments than it deserves. An 89.5 is an A at some schools and a B at others, and that is a handbook question rather than a math question. Last of all, teachers can type a final grade straight into the gradebook, and a manual override beats every calculation underneath it, including their own.

Related calculators

A what-if answer is a projection, and projections tend to lead to one more question: what is still needed. If the only thing left in your course is the exam, the finals grade calculator works out the score you need on it directly.