Grade Scale Calculator
A grading scale is the list of cutoffs that turns a percent into a letter, and American schools do not agree on it. Type a score and this grade scale calculator shows the letter it earns on the ten-point scale, the seven-point scale, and a plus/minus scale at once, then builds the full chart for whichever one you pick. Set your own cutoffs if none of them match, then print the chart.
Pick a scale, type a score, and the chart shows every letter with the range it covers. The same score can be a different letter on a different scale, so the three results below are shown side by side. Which scale applies to you is set by your school or your instructor, not by this page.
The grade chart for this scale
Every letter on the selected scale, with the range of percents it covers and how many whole scores fall inside it.
Runs in your browser. Nothing is sent or stored. A grading scale is a set of cutoffs and nothing more, so the letter you see here is only as right as the scale you chose. Check your syllabus or your district policy before treating any of it as final.
Free to use, no sign-up, and every calculation happens in your browser.
How to use this grade scale calculator
Type a score, pick a scale, and read the chart. The calculator opens on 91 because the ten-point and seven-point scales disagree about that score, so the point of the page is on screen before you touch anything.
- Put the score in. A percent, with or without decimals. Anything that is not a number is ignored.
- Pick the scale for the chart. Ten-point, seven-point and plus/minus set their own cutoffs. Custom lets you move all four.
- Read the three results. The letter is shown on the ten-point, seven-point, and plus/minus scales at once, because the same score is often not the same letter.
Underneath, the chart lists every letter on the scale you picked, the range of percents it covers, and how many whole scores fall inside it. That last column is where the scales give themselves away.
What a grading scale actually decides
A grading scale is a list of cutoffs and nothing else. It does not measure anything, it does not know what the work was worth, and it has no opinion about whether the test was fair. It takes a number you already have and says which letter that number is called.
Which means the letter is a decision, not a measurement. The raw score is the measurement. The scale is somebody choosing where to draw the lines, and different people have drawn them in different places. Every threshold on it was picked by a person, not discovered.
How far does that disagreement go? We went and looked: we read the catalogs of the 100 largest US colleges and found that 90 of them never publish a percentage band at all.
This is easy to miss because a letter grade looks so final. A B on a transcript reads like a fact about the work. It is really a fact about the work and about the cutoff list the school happened to adopt. Move the cutoff list and the same work reports differently, with nothing about the student having changed.
That is why the calculator shows three letters instead of one. A single letter invites you to treat it as the answer. Three letters, sitting side by side and disagreeing, are harder to mistake for a fact.
The ten-point scale and the seven-point scale
Two cutoff lists, and in at least two states one of them replaced the other outright. The gap between them is wider than it looks.
The ten-point scale
Ten points per letter. Kershaw County School District in South Carolina publishes it as A 90 to 100, B 80 to 89, C 70 to 79, D 60 to 69 and F 0 to 59, adopted for the 2016 to 2017 school year.
| Letter | Score range | Whole scores it covers |
|---|---|---|
| A | 90 to 100 | 11 |
| B | 80 to 89 | 10 |
| C | 70 to 79 | 10 |
| D | 60 to 69 | 10 |
| F | 0 to 59 | 60 |
The seven-point scale
Seven points per letter, and a much higher floor. Reporting on North Carolina’s move away from it, the WakeEd Partnership sets out the old scale as A 93 to 100, B 85 to 92, C 77 to 84, D 70 to 76 and F at 69 and below. The state board of education adopted the ten-point scale for public high schools starting with freshmen in the fall of 2015.
| Letter | Score range | Whole scores it covers |
|---|---|---|
| A | 93 to 100 | 8 |
| B | 85 to 92 | 8 |
| C | 77 to 84 | 8 |
| D | 70 to 76 | 7 |
| F | 0 to 69 | 70 |
Put the two lists side by side and 25 of the 101 whole scores land on a different letter. Not a shade different. A different letter, in four separate stretches of the scale: 60 to 69 is an F on one and a D on the other, 70 to 76 is a D or a C, 80 to 84 is a C or a B, and 90 to 92 is a B or an A.
WakeEd put the problem as a question about two students in the same building: will a freshman who earns a 91 average receive an A while a junior with the same average earns a B? On the ten-point scale a 91 is an A. On the seven-point scale it is a B. Same score, same work, two letters.
Where the passing line sits
The bands at the top of the scale get the attention. The one at the bottom does more damage.
Look again at the last column of those two tables. On the ten-point scale, 60 whole scores are an F. On the seven-point scale, 70 are. Ten points of scores that are failing under one list are passing under the other, and they are the ten points closest to the line.
Kershaw County says it plainly: the ten-point scale creates the floor for a passing grade at 60 (D), where the seven-point scale it replaced put the lowest passing grade at 70.
South Carolina made that change for the 2016 to 2017 school year, and Education Week reported the reasoning: the state wanted to minimize the mismatches between its own grading system and the systems used in nearby states and by colleges and universities, a change the state’s education commissioner framed as consistency for incoming students and college applications. The same report noted a second effect, that grade point averages would be calculated differently, putting thousands more students each year in the running for state scholarships. A cutoff list is not only a measuring stick. It decides who qualifies for things.
So a 65 is not a borderline case that could go either way depending on the teacher. It is a clean D on one published scale and a clean F on another, and the only thing that decides it is which cutoff list the school adopted. If you are checking whether a score passes, the scale is not a detail you can skip.
Plus and minus, and the percentages colleges do not publish
A scale that awards whole letters only gives you five possible outcomes. Add pluses and minuses and the letters get finer, but the disagreement does not go away. It moves.
The plus/minus setting on the calculator uses the eleven grades the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Office of the University Registrar awards: A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D and F. Read that list again. There is no A+ and no D-. A student who aces everything at UNC receives the same letter as one who merely did well, and there is no grade between D and F at all.
Here is the part that trips most people up. UNC’s registrar publishes those eleven grades with their grade point values, and publishes no percentage ranges whatsoever. There is no official answer, at that university, to the question of what percent earns a B+.
So where a registrar publishes no percentages, the cutoffs in a college course are the instructor’s rather than the institution’s. The syllabus is the document that settles it. If a college syllabus gives you a cutoff table, that table is the scale for that course, and it may not match the one used by the class next door. The grade point values are a separate question with its own answers, and they are worked through on the page linked at the foot of this one.
Setting your own scale
Plenty of grading scales match none of the three presets. Some districts run an eight-point scale. Some courses set the A at 92 or 94. Some teachers drop the D entirely. Some courses are pass/fail and have only one cutoff to set. Pick Custom and the four boundaries become editable, so you can enter whatever your syllabus or your district grading policy actually says and get a chart that matches it.
The cutoffs have to descend: A above B, B above C, C above D, and D above zero. Put them out of order and the calculator stops and says so rather than building a chart that contradicts itself.
Two things are worth checking once your own scale is in. The first is the whole scores column, which tells you how wide each band really is. A scale that looks balanced on paper often is not, and on all three presets here the F band is the widest by a long way. The second is the comparison line above the chart, which keeps showing what the same score would be on the ten-point and seven-point scales. If your custom scale is much harsher or much softer than both, that is worth knowing before you turn the grades in.
The chart, and printing it
The chart is the part most people came for, and it is printable on its own. It is the whole scale in one block: every letter, the range of percents it covers, and the count of whole scores inside it.
The count is the column worth looking at twice. Letters are not equal in width, and the chart makes that obvious in a way a list of cutoffs does not. On the ten-point scale the A band is 11 scores wide and the F band is 60. Nothing about that is unusual, but it is rarely stated.
Print sends the chart to your printer on its own, without the rest of the page around it. It is meant for the things a cutoff list actually gets used for: taping inside a gradebook, handing out at the start of a course, or pinning next to a desk while you grade. The rest of the page is not printed, because none of it is useful next to a stack of papers.
Every score on all three scales
The full comparison, 0 to 100, on the three scales the calculator ships with. Twelve stretches of the scale, of which the ten-point and seven-point columns disagree on seven.
| Score | Ten-point | Seven-point | Plus/minus |
|---|---|---|---|
| 93 to 100 | A | A | A |
| 90 to 92 | A | B | A- |
| 87 to 89 | B | B | B+ |
| 85 to 86 | B | B | B |
| 83 to 84 | B | C | B |
| 80 to 82 | B | C | B- |
| 77 to 79 | C | C | C+ |
| 73 to 76 | C | D | C |
| 70 to 72 | C | D | C- |
| 67 to 69 | D | F | D+ |
| 60 to 66 | D | F | D |
| 0 to 59 | F | F | F |
The bolded rows are where the ten-point and seven-point scales part company. They cover 25 of the 101 whole scores, and every one of them falls between 60 and 92, the middle of the range rather than either edge.
Where to go next
A scale turns a percent into a letter. The steps on either side of that live elsewhere on the site.
- If you have points rather than a percent, working out the percent comes first, and the percent grade calculator does that step.
- To convert a single score and average a set of letters together, the letter grade calculator is built for it.
- Once you have letters, turning them into grade points is a separate question with its own disagreements, and the letter-to-grade-point calculator sets those out.
- To move a grade from one scale onto another rather than read it on a single scale, the grade conversion calculator shows what the change costs.
- For the course grade that the scale is applied to in the first place, start from the grade calculator on the homepage.
- For the letter behind one specific number, with every percentage from 100 down to 60 listed out, the percentage to letter grade calculator does that job.
One companion page is still planned for this one: a grade conversion calculator for moving between scales in bulk.
Frequently asked questions
What is a grading scale calculator?
It is a tool that turns a percent into a letter using a set of cutoffs you choose, and shows the full chart those cutoffs produce. The useful part is the choosing. A calculator that fixes one scale and does not name it can only ever give you one answer. The same score is a different letter depending on which cutoff list is applied to it.
What is the difference between a seven-point and a ten-point grading scale?
The width of each letter band. The ten-point scale gives each letter ten points, starting the A at 90. The seven-point scale gives each letter about seven, starting the A at 93 and the D at 70. Laid over the whole range, 25 of the 101 whole scores come out as a different letter, and the lowest passing score moves from 70 to 60. North Carolina moved from the seven-point scale to the ten-point scale for public high schools beginning in the fall of 2015.
What grade is a 91?
On the ten-point scale a 91 is an A, because the A band starts at 90. On the seven-point scale it is a B, because the A band starts at 93. On a plus/minus scale it is an A-. This is the clearest example of why the scale has to be named before the letter means anything, and it is the case the calculator opens on.
Can I set my own grading scale?
Yes. Pick Custom and the four cutoffs become editable, so you can enter the scale from your syllabus or your district policy. The chart rebuilds around whatever you type, including the count of whole scores in each band. The cutoffs have to descend in order, and the calculator stops and tells you if they do not.
What is a 4.0 scale?
That is a different kind of scale. The scales on this page turn a percent into a letter. A 4.0 scale turns a letter into grade points, usually A 4.0, B 3.0, C 2.0, D 1.0 and F 0.0, so that grades from different courses can be averaged into a GPA. Schools disagree about that scale too, particularly over whether an A+ exists and what it is worth. The grade to gpa calculator linked above works through those differences.
Do colleges publish percentage cutoffs?
Not necessarily. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s registrar publishes its eleven letter grades and the grade point value of each, and publishes no percentage ranges at all. Where that is the case, the percent cutoffs are set by the instructor rather than the institution, and the syllabus is the document that decides them. Two courses at the same university can use different cutoffs without either one breaking a rule.
Can I print the grade chart?
Yes. The Print button sends the chart on its own, without the rest of the page. That is deliberate, because the chart is the part you might want on paper, taped inside a gradebook or handed out at the start of a course. Change the scale first and the printed chart matches whatever is on screen, including a custom scale you typed yourself.
Is a 60 a passing grade?
On the ten-point scale, yes, a 60 is the bottom of the D band. On the seven-point scale it is an F, because the lowest passing score there is 70. Kershaw County School District described the switch in exactly those terms when it adopted the ten-point scale, noting that the new scale puts the floor for a passing grade at 60. So the answer depends entirely on which scale your school uses, which is why it is worth checking rather than assuming.