Grade Conversion Calculator
Convert a grade from one grading scale to another: plus/minus to whole letters, a 4.33 scale to a 4.0, a weighted 5.0 back to unweighted, or cutoffs you type in yourself. This grade conversion calculator gives you the letter, the band and the grade points on the scale you need, and tells you what the conversion threw away. If the cutoffs matter more than the conversion, start with the grading scale behind it.
Pick the scale your grade came from, pick the scale you need it on, and type the grade. Converting between scales is not lossless, so the result also tells you what the conversion throws away.
Both scales side by side
Every letter on the scale you are converting from, and what each one becomes on the scale you are converting to. Where a letter covers more than one grade on the target scale, the grade points shown are for the middle of that range, which is the figure the calculator returns.
Runs in your browser. Nothing is sent or stored. A conversion is an estimate built from two sets of cutoffs, and the school receiving it is free to use its own. Treat the result as a guide, not as a grade anyone has agreed to.
Free to use, no sign-up, and every calculation happens in your browser.
How to use this grade conversion calculator
Pick the scale the grade came from, pick the scale you need it on, and type the grade. The tool opens on a B+ going from plus/minus to whole letters, because that conversion loses something, and it says so on screen rather than just handing you a letter.
- Set the two scales. The first menu is where the grade came from, the second is where it needs to go. Any pair works, including the same scale twice, which is a quick way to read one scale on its own.
- Choose how you are entering it. Letter, percent, or grade points. A letter is treated as the whole band it covers, a percent as one exact score, and grade points as the closest letter on the source scale.
- Read the result, then the note under it. The letter, its band, and its grade points sit at the top. Underneath, the tool says whether the conversion was clean or whether it collapsed several grades into one.
- Use Custom if your school is not a preset. Type your own four cutoffs and your own top grade point, and either side of the conversion can use them.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The conversion runs in your browser, and the chart under the tool redraws for whichever pair of scales you select.
What a conversion actually does, and what it loses
A letter grade is not a number. It is a range. On the standard plus/minus scale a B covers 83 up to just under 87, so every score in that band is the same letter. Hold on to that, because it explains every strange result a converter can give you.
Converting a letter between scales means taking the range it covers on the first scale and asking which letter covers that range on the second. Sometimes nothing is lost. Often something is. Go from plus/minus to whole letters and A+, A, and A- all land on A. Three grades become one, and no arithmetic gets them back: a transcript that said A+ and a transcript that said A- now say the same thing. Run it the other way and the opposite problem appears. A whole-letter A could be an A-, an A, or an A+, and the tool has to choose. It uses the middle of the range and names the other two.
So a converted grade is an estimate built from two sets of cutoffs, and the direction decides how much to trust it. Converting into a coarser scale is a one-way trip. Converting into a finer one is a guess, and it is only an honest guess if somebody tells you that is what it is.
Often the scale you are converting from was never published either. Only 10 of the 100 largest US colleges publish a percentage band, so for the other 90 the cutoffs you are converting from came from an instructor, not a catalog.
Every scale side by side
Below is the standard plus/minus scale alongside whole letters and grade points on a 4.33 scale. Read the whole letters column first: it is where the collapsing happens in plain sight.
| Letter | Plus/minus % | Whole letters | Grade points (4.0) | Grade points (4.33) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A+ | 97 to 100 | A | 4.0 | 4.33 |
| A | 93 to 96.9 | A | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| A- | 90 to 92.9 | A | 3.7 | 3.67 |
| B+ | 87 to 89.9 | B | 3.3 | 3.33 |
| B | 83 to 86.9 | B | 3.0 | 3.0 |
| B- | 80 to 82.9 | B | 2.7 | 2.67 |
| C+ | 77 to 79.9 | C | 2.3 | 2.33 |
| C | 73 to 76.9 | C | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| C- | 70 to 72.9 | C | 1.7 | 1.67 |
| D+ | 67 to 69.9 | D | 1.3 | 1.33 |
| D | 63 to 66.9 | D | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| D- | 60 to 62.9 | D | 0.7 | 0.67 |
| F | below 60 | F | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Twelve passing grades on the left, four on the right. The 4.0 and 4.33 columns agree on A, B, C, and D and disagree everywhere else, which is why a GPA quoted without its scale does not mean much.
Converting between US scales
A conversion does not have to cross a border to be awkward. Two American scales can disagree about how many grades exist and what the top one is worth, and those disagreements produce the conversions below.
Plus/minus to whole letters, and back. This is the transfer student’s conversion and the lossy one described above. Going to whole letters, pluses and minuses disappear. Coming from whole letters, they have to be invented, so the tool picks the middle grade and names the alternatives.
A 4.33 scale to a 4.0 scale. Some schools award 4.33 for an A+ rather than capping it at 4.0. The conversion only changes anything for students who earned A+ grades, and it changes it in one direction: on a 4.0 scale an A+ is worth the same as an A. Everything from B+ downward differs by a rounding step, 3.33 against 3.3, and that gap compounds once you average a full transcript.
A weighted 5.0 back to an unweighted 4.0. This is the conversion behind the question of how to turn a 5.0 GPA into a 4.0 scale, and the one where a converter can mislead you most. A weighted scale adds points for harder courses, so a 5.0 is not a percentage that ran over. Converting it down is not division. It is asking what each letter is worth once the extra weight is removed, and switching this tool from 5.0 weighted to plus/minus shows each letter losing its bonus point.
In all three cases the arithmetic is the easy part. What decides the answer is which cutoffs each school published, and schools do not agree.
Why there is no official table for international grades
Search for a way to turn a European, Indian, or Latin American grade into a US letter and you will find plenty of tables. The useful question is where their numbers came from, and that is harder to answer than it looks.
The obvious authority to check is ECTS, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, which is what people usually mean by a European standard. Read the European Commission’s own page on ECTS and there is no grade conversion table on it, and no grade mapping of any kind. ECTS is a credit system rather than a grading system: its credits, in the Commission’s words, “represent learning based on defined learning outcomes and their associated workload.” Sixty credits is a full year of study. That is what the system measures, and grades are not part of it.
So a converter that shows an ECTS grade becoming a US letter is publishing a number the issuing authority does not publish. It may be a perfectly reasonable estimate. It is not an official one, and nothing about a neatly formatted table tells you which of the two you are reading.
The credential evaluation services that do this professionally assess a transcript against the specific institution and country it came from, which is a judgment rather than a lookup, and the databases behind that work are commercial products rather than published standards. World Education Services, one of the largest, states that it holds knowledge of institutions in 203 countries and runs its own iGPA calculator, while describing the service rather than the formula behind it. That is why this page publishes no international conversion table: one we could not source would look exactly like one we could. If you are applying abroad, the number that counts is the one the receiving institution or its evaluator produces, so ask them which system they use rather than arriving with a figure from a converter.
When an institution converts your grades for you
Sometimes the conversion is not yours to make. Applying to medical school in the United States means your transcript goes through AMCAS, the American Medical College Application Service, run by the AAMC. It recalculates your GPA itself, so that medical schools can compare academic records from colleges that grade differently.
It does this, in the AAMC’s description, “based on conversions provided by undergraduate institutions,” and the organization states that the result may not match the GPA on your own transcript. Three of its rules show why, and each is a conversion decision rather than arithmetic.
- Pluses and minuses count even if your school ignores them. A school awarding only whole letters still has those grades read as plus/minus values. The AAMC adds that the size of that step is not settled either: at some schools a plus or minus moves the value by 0.3 or 0.7, at others by 0.5.
- An A+ is not worth more than an A. The AAMC states that the program “assigns the same weight (4.0) to grades of A+ and A.” A 4.33 scale rewards an A+. This one deliberately does not.
- Every attempt at a repeated course counts. The AAMC says this holds even where the school replaces the first grade with the second.
The detail that makes the wider point is the shape of the AAMC’s own Grade Conversion Guide. It is not one conversion table. It sorts American and Canadian schools into nine grading system types, from letters with pluses and minuses, through half-step grades like AB and BC, through pass/fail, to percentage and numeric systems and a category for unusual combinations. One organization, one country plus Canada, nine tables.
None of those tables are reproduced here: the guide is published for personal use by applicants and their advisors and asks for permission for anything else. It is linked above, and the AAMC pages on transcript grades and grades factored into the AMCAS GPA set out the rules above.
A GPA is not a percentage
A question that keeps coming up is what a 92.8 GPA works out to on a 4.0 scale. The question has no answer, because 92.8 is not a GPA. It is a percentage average that somewhere along the way got called one.
The two live on different scales. A percentage runs from 0 to 100 and measures how much of the available credit you earned. A grade point average runs from 0 to 4.0, or 4.33, or 5.0, and measures the average value of your letter grades. Moving between them is a real operation, and this tool will do it, but it is a conversion and not a relabeling.
Run 92.8 through as a percent on the plus/minus scale and it lands on an A-, worth 3.7 grade points. That is the honest answer. It feels wrong only because 92.8 looks like a big number and 3.7 does not, though they describe the same performance. The same confusion sits behind the question of whether 90% is a 3.7: on the standard scale 90 is exactly where the A- band starts, so a 90 is an A- and an A- is 3.7. One percentage converts cleanly to one letter. A full GPA does not, because it is an average of many letters weighted by credit hours.
Where to go next
This page converts a grade from one scale to another. The rest of the toolkit handles the jobs either side of that.
- To turn one grade into grade points and move between letters, percentages, and points on a single scale, use the grade to GPA tool.
- To look up what letter a percentage earns, including how far a score sits from the next letter up, use the percentage to letter grade tool.
Frequently asked questions
What is a grade conversion calculator?
It takes a grade on one grading scale and tells you what the same grade is on another. That differs from converting between formats on a single scale, which turns a letter into a percentage or grade points without changing the scale underneath. This page does the scale to scale job: a B+ on a plus/minus scale becoming a B on a whole-letter scale, or an A worth 5.0 weighted becoming an A worth 4.0 unweighted.
How do I convert a 5.0 GPA to a 4.0 scale?
Not by dividing. A weighted 5.0 scale gives extra grade points for harder courses, so 5.0 is a maximum rather than a percentage. Convert each letter by reading its value on the unweighted scale instead: an A worth 5.0 weighted is worth 4.0 unweighted, a B worth 4.0 becomes 3.0, and so on down. A single weighted GPA figure cannot be converted reliably on its own, because it does not say how many of your courses carried extra weight.
Is 90% a 3.7 GPA?
On the standard plus/minus scale, yes. The A- band starts at exactly 90 and an A- is worth 3.7 grade points, so a 90 converts to an A- and to 3.7. Two things change that answer. On a whole-letter scale there is no A-, so a 90 is an A worth 4.0. And on a 4.33 scale an A- is worth 3.67 rather than 3.7. The scale has to be named before the number means anything.
What is a 92.8 GPA on a 4.0 scale?
92.8 is not a GPA. It is a percentage average, and a GPA does not go above 4.0 on a standard unweighted scale. Converted as a percentage on the plus/minus scale, 92.8 is an A- and worth 3.7 grade points. If you have a percentage average for a whole year and want a GPA from it, converting that average is a rough shortcut. The accurate way is to convert each course grade, then average those weighted by credit hours.
Can I convert an international grade to a US GPA?
Not from a published standard, because no issuing authority publishes one. The European Commission’s ECTS page describes a credit system based on learning outcomes and workload and contains no grade conversion table at all. Credential evaluation services do produce US equivalents, but they assess each transcript against its specific institution and country, and they charge for it. A free international table is an estimate. For an application that matters, ask the receiving institution which evaluator it accepts.
How does AMCAS convert my grades?
AMCAS recalculates your GPA from your transcript rather than accepting the figure your school reports, using conversion information supplied by the institutions themselves, and the AAMC warns the result may not match your transcript. Three rules change grades schools treat differently: pluses and minuses count even at schools that do not award them, an A+ gets the same 4.0 weight as an A, and every attempt at a repeated course counts. The AAMC Grade Conversion Guide sorts American and Canadian schools into nine grading system types rather than one table.
My school has no plus or minus grades. What happens when I convert?
Going from whole letters into a plus/minus scale invents information your transcript never carried. A B covers 83 up to just under 87 on the standard scale, which spans B-, B, and B+, so there is no single correct answer. This tool reports the middle grade and lists the alternatives rather than hiding the choice. Be careful quoting the result as though it were your grade: it is what your grade would look like on a scale your school does not use.
Will my new school accept this conversion?
Treat the result as a guide, not a grade anyone has agreed to. A receiving school, a transfer office, or an application service is free to use its own cutoffs, and AMCAS is a documented example of one that does. A converted grade is good for knowing roughly where you stand before you ask, and which questions to ask: which scale they convert to, whether they count pluses and minuses, and how they handle repeated courses. The registrar can answer all three.
Can I set my own cutoffs?
Yes. Choose Custom on either side of the conversion, or both, and five inputs appear: where A, B, C, and D each start, and what the top grade is worth. Use them when your school publishes cutoffs that are not the standard ones, rather than assuming the standard chart applies. Cutoffs have to descend in order and the top grade point has to be above 3, so a D is still worth more than an F. If not, the tool says so instead of quietly producing a nonsensical scale.