Letter Grade Calculator

The bands applied here are the ones most widely used in the United States: A from 90, B from 80, C from 70, D from 60, and F below 60, with plus and minus splitting each ten-point band into thirds. So 93 and up is a straight A, 90 to 92 is an A-, 87 to 89 is a B+, 83 to 86 a B, and 80 to 82 a B-. This tool also awards an A+ at 97 and above, though many institutions record nothing higher than a plain A. That is a defensible default and nothing more. The next section explains why it cannot be anything more.

This is the single most useful thing to know about grade conversion, and it is routinely presented the other way round. No national body sets percentage-to-letter cutoffs in the United States. The scale is chosen by the state, the district, the institution, the department, or the individual instructor — and in practice all five levels get involved somewhere. The variation is not trivial. Some schools cut an A at 90, others at 93, others at 94. Some use plus and minus throughout, some only minus, some neither. Some run a straight ten-point scale, some compress the lower bands, and some grade on a curve where the cutoffs are not fixed in advance at all. Two students with the same 89.5% at different institutions can genuinely hold different letters, and neither school is doing anything wrong. So treat the letter this page returns as the common convention, not a verdict. The document that governs your grade is your syllabus. If it states cutoffs, those are the real ones; if it does not, ask, because the answer is not inferable from anything published nationally. Be especially wary of any site that presents a single conversion table as "the official US scale". There is not one to be official about.

Lay the bands out and something odd appears: A, B, C and D are ten points wide each. F covers sixty. A student at 58% and a student who never submitted anything both receive an F, and on the 4.0 scale both receive 0.0. Fifty-eight points of difference in performance vanish completely. Meanwhile, at the top of the scale, one point can separate a B+ from an A-. This asymmetry is why a single zero is so destructive to an average, and why some schools have adopted minimum-grade policies that floor a failing score at 50 rather than 0 — a change to the arithmetic rather than to the standard. Whether your institution does this is a local policy question. It also means the letter compresses information in a lopsided way. Above 60, the letter tells you roughly where you stand within a ten-point window. Below 60, it tells you almost nothing at all.

Each letter maps to grade points on the 4.0 scale: A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, D = 1.0, F = 0.0, with plus and minus grades landing on the intermediate steps — B+ at 3.3, B- at 2.7, and so on. Those points, weighted by credit hours, are what a GPA averages. The conversion is deliberately lossy, and the loss runs one way. A 93% and a 100% are both an A and both 4.0; seven points of difference disappear the moment the letter is recorded. This is exactly why a transcript cannot be reverse-engineered into percentages — knowing someone earned a B tells you their score was somewhere between 83 and 86, and no more than that. The practical consequence: once you are safely inside a band, additional points buy you nothing on the transcript. Once you are near a boundary, a point or two is worth a great deal. Knowing which situation you are in is worth more than any general advice about working harder. Note too that A+ is treated as 4.0 here, matching the most common practice, but some institutions award 4.33 and allow a GPA above 4.0 without any honors weighting at all.

Almost every argument about a grade happens within a point of a cutoff, and the mathematics has run out by then. An 89.5% may be recorded as an A- or a B+ depending on whether your instructor rounds to the nearest whole number, rounds up at any fraction, or truncates. All three are ordinary practice, and none is more correct than the others. If the syllabus does not say, the only reliable way to find out is to ask. When you are close, work backwards to what a boundary actually costs. If the final exam is worth 25% of the course, gaining one point of course grade requires four points on that exam. That converts a vague hope into a concrete target, and it sometimes reveals that the boundary is out of reach — which is also worth knowing early. One last practical note: the letter matters more than the percentage in almost every downstream use. Scholarships, prerequisites, athletic eligibility and graduate applications read the transcript, and the transcript carries letters and grade points. Optimize for the band, not for the decimal.