90 of the 100 Largest US Colleges Never Say What Percentage Earns an A

At a glance

• 10 of the 100 publish what percentage earns an A. The other 90 give an A a grade point value and never say what you have to score to get one.
• The 10 that do publish a band disagree by four points: 5 start an A at 93, 4 start it at 90, and one starts it at 94.
• 34 of the 97 letter-grading institutions have no plus or minus grades at all.
• 23 award an A+, and 16 of those cap it at 4.00, exactly equal to a plain A. 74 of the 97 do not offer one.
• 7 institutions can produce a grade point average (GPA) above 4.0.
• 9 of them do not use F. Failure is an E.
• Three of the 100 do not use letter grades at all, between them enrolling 227,952 undergraduates.

Read from primary sources between 16 and 17 September 2026. Every institution links to its own catalog in the table below.

Only 10 of the 100 say what percentage earns an A

This is the finding that surprised us most. 90 institutions define exactly what an A is worth in grade points, to three decimal places in some cases, and then stop. They never state the score that earns one.

The University of Central Florida is the one that says so outright:

There is no official policy on the relation between the letter grade and the percentage grade (for instance, an A- being equal to a grade of 90-92). It is up to each instructor of record to determine the equivalency and to notify students.

That is the honest version of what the other 89 leave unsaid. The institution decides what an A is worth. The instructor decides what earns one, course by course, in the syllabus.

So when a calculator tells a student that 89.4% is a B+, it is not reporting a fact about their college. It is applying a convention their college has never published and may not use.

The ten that do publish a band cannot agree

5 of them start an A at 93, 4 start it at 90, and one starts it at 94. Four points separate the top and the bottom of that range, which is enough to change the letter on a transcript.

Take a score of 92. It is a full A at 4 of the 10 and not an A at the other 6: five of those record it as an A-, and at Grand Canyon it does not reach the A band at all. Same score, same effort, different letter.

Who publishes a band, and who does not

The pattern is not random. 4 of the 6 for-profit institutions in the sample publish a percentage band, and 2 of the 7 private nonprofits, against 4 of the 87 publics. The institutions that tell you the number are overwhelmingly the online and career-focused ones, where a student is more likely to be comparing the offer before enrolling.

A third of them have no plus or minus at all

Of the 97 institutions whose grading scale uses letter grades, 34 award bare letters with nothing attached. 47 use some combination of plus and minus, and 16 use the full range including both an A+ and a D-.

Those 34 are not spread evenly.

Texas is an outlier. Seventeen Texas institutions made the sample and 14 of them issue bare letters. Only UT Austin, Houston and UT San Antonio use plus and minus at all.

Community colleges mostly do not. 15 of the 17 two-year institutions in the sample use bare letters.

Wisconsin does something else again. It has no plus or minus grades, and instead uses intermediate letter pairs, AB worth 3.5 and BC worth 2.5, sitting between the whole letters. There is no CD.

A calculator offering A- and B+ is therefore offering grades that a third of these institutions do not issue. If you want the letter your own college would actually record, our number to letter grade calculator lets you set the scale rather than assuming one.

The A+ is close to a coin flip, and usually worth nothing extra

23 of the 97 award an A+. 74 do not.

Of the 23 that do, 16 cap it at 4.00, exactly equal to a plain A. It appears on the transcript and changes nothing in the GPA. Only 7 pay more for it, topping out at 4.333 at NC State and Minnesota.

San José State explains its own cap by pointing above itself:

In accordance with California regulations, a grade of A+ carries a maximum value of 4.0 grade points.

Minnesota’s is stranger. The A+ exists, it is worth 4.333, and an undergraduate cannot earn one: the catalog restricts it to Law School courses numbered 6000 and 7000. Ohio State simply states what it does not do, which is rarer than it should be: “Ohio State does not offer the grades of A+ and D-.”

If you are turning letters into a GPA, the A+ question changes the answer, so our letter grade to GPA calculator asks which scale you are on instead of picking one for you.

The same letter is worth different numbers

There is no single value for a B+, the number of grade points it earns per credit hour. Across the 97 letter-grading institutions:

The 3.3 against 3.33 split is rounding and matters less than it looks. The rest are real disagreements about what a plus is worth. Three institutions treat a plus as half a grade, two treat it as a quarter, and three Utah institutions, BYU, BYU-Idaho and Utah Valley, use 3.4, 2.4 and 1.4, a scale almost nobody outside that state uses.

A- splits the same way: 3.7 at 35 institutions, 3.67 at 16, 3.667 at 4, and 3.75 at 3.

Alabama is unusual in explaining the arithmetic rather than only tabulating it. “The plus sign added to a grade raises the points awarded by 0.33 points per hour. A minus sign lowers the points awarded by 0.33 points.” It also settles a question every prerequisite rule runs into: where a regulation requires a minimum grade of C, “a ‘C’ indicates ‘any kind of C.’”

Some catalogs call these quality points rather than grade points; the two mean the same thing.

Moving a grade between two of these scales is exactly what our letter grade conversion calculator is for.

9 of them do not use F

Failure is an E at Arizona State, Ohio State, the University of Arizona, Florida, Utah Valley, the University of Utah, BYU, Michigan and Kentucky.

At Kentucky the two letters coexist and mean different things. Senate Rule 5.1.1 gives an E to a student who fails a letter-graded course and reserves F for a student who fails a course taken pass/fail. Both can appear on the same transcript, and they are not interchangeable.

Kentucky is also where the plus/minus question gets its cleanest answer. The university-wide scale is bare A, B, C, D, E. Plus and minus exist only as a documented exception, in the College of Law, which runs A+ 4.3, A 4.0, A- 3.7 and on down through C+ 2.3 to D- 0.7. Medicine, Dentistry and some Architecture courses are exempt from the university scale as well.

Three of the 100 do not use letters at all

Michigan State and Washington both grade numerically. Washington is the more radical of the two:

The UW uses a numerical grading system, with certain exceptions in the schools of Dentistry, Law, and Medicine. Instructors may report grades from 4.0 to 0.7 in 0.1 increments and the grade 0.0.

That is 35 distinct grades where most institutions have eleven or twelve. Washington does publish a letter equivalence table, but every letter maps to a range rather than a value, so an A covers 4.0 and 3.9 while an A- covers everything from 3.8 down to 3.5. The band from 0.6 to 0.1 cannot be awarded at all; anything reported there is converted to 0.0.

Michigan State issues numbers in half-point steps from 4.0 to 0.0. Western Governors, the second largest institution in the sample, is competency-based and has no letter scale to publish. It issues an explanatory letter to employers and admissions offices precisely because its transcript does not look like anyone else’s.

Between them these three enroll 227,952 undergraduates.

The scale is often not the college’s to set

The body deciding what an A is worth is frequently not the university at all.

• Nevada. UNLV and the College of Southern Nevada publish identical scales because both follow the Nevada System of Higher Education policy. Both make plus/minus optional at the instructor’s discretion, and UNLV adds that a student may not appeal the format an instructor chooses.
• Georgia. Kennesaw State’s scale is set by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents, and the catalog cites the policy section.
• California. San José State attributes its A+ cap to state regulation.

Two states go further and overrule the university at the point where it matters most to a student. LSU awards an A+ worth 4.3, then has to throw it away:

LOSFA has informed the university with respect to TOPS, that they will not accept plus/minus grades. Therefore, for example, if a student earns an A+ the university is required to report an A.

Georgia State computes a separate GPA for the HOPE scholarship that, in the catalog’s words, “does not include plus or minus attributes. For example, both a B+ and B- will be treated as the equivalent of a B.”

A student at either institution therefore has two different GPAs, and the one that decides their funding is calculated on a scale their own university does not use.

Sometimes it is the instructor’s call, not the institution’s

At the University of South Florida:

USF faculty may use a plus/minus grading system to assign student grades. The use of the plus/minus grading system is at the discretion of the individual faculty member.

UNLV and the College of Southern Nevada say the same thing. In those three institutions two students with identical percentages in different sections of the same course can receive different letters, legitimately, and neither has grounds to appeal.

Which is why the percentage is the only number you fully control. Our percentage grade calculator works that out from points earned and points possible, before any scale is applied to it.

Scales change, and a few institutions say when

Most catalogs present the current scale as though it had always been the scale. Four in this sample date the change, which makes the drift visible.

• Florida publishes both scales on one page. Before 11 May 2009 there were no minus grades and a plus was worth half a point. From that date it became the conventional .33/.67 scale with minuses added.
• UC Irvine introduced plus and minus grades in fall quarter 1973, and the A+ sixteen years later in fall quarter 1989.
• Virginia Tech added plus and minus effective fall quarter 1979.
• Colorado State went the other way and stopped assigning C-, D+ and D- in fall 2008, the only institution in the sample documented as removing grades from its scale.

Underneath the institutional scale, the exceptions pile up

22 of the 100 rows record a rule that applies to only part of the institution. Nursing programs set higher pass marks. Law schools run their own scales. Medical clerkships use Honors/High Pass/Pass/Fail rather than letters. Tennessee’s First Year Composition courses cannot award a D or an F at all. Purdue Global fails a nursing student below 75 and everyone else below 60. CSN counts a D in your major occupational area as a pass that does not count toward the degree.

The institutional scale is the top layer, not the whole story.

One institution’s published scale contradicts itself

The University of Utah’s Policy 6-100 says student work is reported as “D+, D, D-, substandard performance, marginal achievement.” The conversion table immediately below it, the one the Registrar actually uses, lists no D- at all and assigns a D the value 0.7, which is the number every other institution in this sample gives a D-.

So a Utah D is worth less than a D anywhere else in the sample, and the D- named in the policy has no published value. We recorded the table rather than the prose, because the table is what computes the GPA.

What this means if you are converting a percentage to a letter

Five things follow from the data, and they apply to our calculators as much as anyone else’s.

1. The percentage-to-letter mapping is not a fact. It is a convention, and at 90 of these 100 institutions it is not a published one. Any tool that converts a score to a letter should say whose scale it is using.
2. Do not assume plus and minus exist. 34 of the 97 do not use them, and three more leave it to the instructor.
3. Do not assume an A+ beats an A. At 16 of the 23 institutions that award one it is worth exactly the same, and at 74 it does not exist.
4. Do not assume F. 9 of these institutions use E, and Kentucky uses both for different things.
5. Do not assume 4.0 is the ceiling. 7 of them can produce a GPA above it, and two states then flatten it back down for scholarship purposes.

Our own grading scale calculator takes the first point seriously: it shows the ten-point, seven-point and plus/minus scales side by side rather than picking one, and lets you enter your own cutoffs when none of them match your syllabus. If you only want to know where a single score lands, the percent to letter grade calculator does that one job.

And if you are tracking one class rather than converting one score, the college grade calculator keeps a single course’s weights and scores in one place.

Get the data

Everything above is published as open data. Every row carries the exact registrar or catalog page the values were read from, so any single figure can be checked against its source, and an IPEDS unitid, so the file joins to federal enrolment, finance and completion data.

Licence: CC BY 4.0. Use it for anything, including commercially. The one condition is attribution: credit Calculate Your Grade and link to this page.

One caution, because it changes answers. Registrars publish the same policy at different precisions, so 3.33, 3.333 and 3.334 all appear in the per-grade file and are one policy written three ways. Counted exactly as published there are 102 distinct letter and value pairs; rounded to two decimals there are 39. Use the grade_points_normalized column for analysis, and the verbatim grade_points column when you need to check a row against the page it came from.

Four files, last rebuilt 19 September 2026.

How we did it: methodology and limits

The sample

The 100 largest US institutions by undergraduate enrollment, taken from the US Department of Education’s College Scorecard and sorted by undergraduate headcount. Between them they enroll 3,723,698 undergraduates across 36 states and territories: 87 public, 7 private nonprofit and 6 private for-profit. Arizona State appears once, with its Campus and Digital Immersion entries merged, and San Jacinto Community College enters at 100 as a result.

Source rules

Primary sources only: the institution’s own catalog, bulletin, registrar policy, senate rule or transcript key. No aggregators, no third-party college sites, no other calculator sites. Every row carries the URL it came from, so any claim here can be checked at source. Most rows also store the verbatim passage the values were read from.

Two rules did most of the work. “Not published” is recorded as a finding rather than a gap, which is why 90 rows have an empty percentage band instead of a plausible guess. And nothing is interpolated: if a catalog gives grade point values but never states a percentage, the percentage field stays empty rather than borrowing one from a similar institution.

What we got wrong, and fixed

A closing audit over all 100 rows found five defects. They are listed here because the same mistakes are easy for anyone re-running this to make.

1. The extractor only ever looked for F, so the 9 institutions that use E initially had no failing grade recorded at all. Nothing required one, so the gap was invisible.
2. Florida publishes two scales on one page, the one in force before 11 May 2009 and the one after. The parser read B+ from the old table.
3. Alabama’s D+ was captured as 3.99, from a worked GPA example higher up the page rather than from the grade table. It passed the original checks because those only tested that A > B > C > D.
4. Washington was first recorded as a letter-grade institution with an A- worth 3.8. It does not use letters; 3.8 is the bottom of the range its A- covers.
5. The recording helper matched institutions by name prefix, and “Brigham Young University” is a prefix of “Brigham Young University-Idaho”. The Provo data was written onto the Idaho row. Both were rebuilt from their own sources. The two share a scale but differ on the failing letter: Provo uses E, Idaho uses F.

Every scale in the table now passes an ordering check, that each value descends from A+ through to the failing grade, and no two institutions share a source URL.

Honest limits

• Largest-by-enrollment over-represents large online institutions. Southern New Hampshire, Western Governors and the University of Phoenix are the three largest undergraduate populations in the country. That is a real fact about where US undergraduates are, but it is not a sample of selective residential colleges.
• Catalogs change. Every row is stamped with the date it was read.
• Department and instructor-level variation sits beneath the institutional policy and is out of scope, except where a catalog documents it.
• Four institutions have no failing letter recorded: Michigan State and Washington because they do not use letters, Western Governors because it is competency-based, and Maryland Global Campus because its published GPA page lists only A, B, C and D and never says what failure is called.

Researched and written by Mahmudul, who built Calculate Your Grade. Data captured 17 September 2026 from 100 primary institutional sources.

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