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Homework 92 at 20%, quizzes 88 at 20%, a midterm 85 at 25%, final not yet graded: this page answers 88.08%, and that figure covers 65% of the course. Score the final at 70 and the course average is 81.75%. Put your own syllabus in below, then read what the second and third output lines are telling you.
Last updated 7 October 2026
Weights should typically total 100%. Partial totals are scaled for a provisional average.
Estimates only, and a percentage is not a grade. This page computes a weighted average of the category scores you type, scaled over the weight that carries a score. It has no view of drop rules, curves, extra credit, late penalties, point weighting inside a category, or the percentage-to-letter cutoffs that turn this number into a grade. Those cutoffs are usually your instructor's and are published in the syllabus rather than the catalogue. Your syllabus and your instructor are the authority.
The calculator above opens with four rows from an ordinary syllabus: homework at 20% of the grade scoring 92, quizzes at 20% scoring 88, a midterm at 25% scoring 85, and a final worth 35% with no score in it yet. It answers 88.08%, and it tells you two other numbers that matter more than the first one: weights with scores 65.0%, all weights entered 100.0%.
So the 88.08% is not your course grade. It is your average across the 65% of the course that has been graded. The arithmetic: 92 times 20 is 1,840, 88 times 20 is 1,760, 85 times 25 is 2,125, which totals 5,725, divided by the 65 points of weight that carried a score. The final is absent from both halves of the division. It is not being treated as a zero, and it is not being treated as an 88 either; it is simply not there.
That has a consequence worth saying plainly, because it is the single most common way students misread a running average. A provisional average assumes the ungraded work will go as well as the graded work has. Here is the same course, finished, at every plausible final-exam score.
Same three graded categories, final worth 35%
One row in that table is the provisional figure and the rest are the outcomes. The gap between the top and the bottom is 34.99 points on an identical set of graded work. Anyone treating 88.08% as “my grade” in week ten is reading the one row that is guaranteed not to be the answer unless the final lands on it exactly.
This is worth isolating because the two look alike on screen and mean opposite things. Leave the final's score box empty and the page answers 88.08%. Type 0 into it and the page answers 57.25%. Same four rows, same weights, a 30.83-point difference, and the only thing that changed was whether the page believes that work has been assessed.
Online gradebooks make the same distinction and it catches people out there too. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Canvas guidance states that “Any cell in the Canvas gradebook that possesses a dash ('-') is considered by Canvas to be ungraded”, and that “An ungraded assignment is ignored by Canvas in its calculation of a final grade; the points associated with that assignment are considered nonexistent.” The same page is blunt about what that means in practice: “When assignments remain ungraded, inaccurate grades are displayed in the gradebook, seen by instructor and student alike.”
So when your gradebook percentage and this page disagree, the first thing to check is not the arithmetic. It is whether something has a dash in it.
Because the formula is linear in each score, you can invert it. If 65% of the course averages 88.08 and you want 90.00 overall with 35% left:
needed = (target − graded_average × graded_weight) ÷ remaining_weight = (90 − 0.65 × 88.0769) ÷ 0.35 = 93.57
Put 93.57 into the final's score box on this page and it returns exactly 90.00%. Two things fall out of that number. One, each remaining point of weight has to carry the whole shortfall, so the smaller the final's weight the more extreme the required score becomes. Two, a target can be arithmetically out of reach: if the same course needed a 95 overall, the final would have to come in at 108.57, and unless extra credit exists the answer is that the grade is not available any more. Finding that out in week ten is better than finding it out in week fifteen. The final grade calculator does this inversion directly.
This page has no opinion about what homework should be worth. It takes the numbers you type, and those numbers should be copied out of the syllabus rather than remembered, because institutions require the syllabus to state them. The University of Minnesota's syllabus-requirements policy obliges instructors to include “a schedule of approximate due dates and relative weight of each toward the grade; and a description of how the overall course grade will be determined”.
That second clause is the one to read twice. “How the overall course grade will be determined” is where drop rules, curves, rounding conventions, participation marks and extra credit live, and none of them are visible to a weighted-average calculator. If the syllabus says the lowest quiz is dropped, the number you type for the quiz category has to be worked out with that quiz already removed.
Not every course is graded by weighted categories. The other common scheme is total points: every assignment contributes its raw points to one running total out of the course's total possible points. The two produce different answers on identical work, and the difference is not small.
Say homework is ten assignments of 20 points each, 200 points in total, and you score 180 of them. The two exams are 100 points each, 200 points in total, and you score 140.
Six points apart, from the same scores. Under total points the homework silently became half the course because it happened to carry half the available points. Under the stated weights it is a fifth. This is the error the University of Illinois's Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning warns instructors about: having decided what weight each component should have, “the instructor should ensure that the desired weights are actually used. This task is not as simple as it first appears.”
Their illustration goes a step past point totals and is worth knowing if you are trying to predict where you will land in a class rather than what your own percentage is. “Suppose that a 40-item exam and an 80-item exam are to be combined so they have equal weight (50 percent-50 percent in the total). We must know something about the spread of scores or variability (e.g., standard deviation) on each exam before adding the scores together.” Their worked figure has the two exams at standard deviations of 7.0 and 3.5, a desired weight of 1 to 1, and an observed weight of 2 to 1: the exam on which scores were more spread out dominated the combined total regardless of the nominal weighting. Your own percentage is still exactly what the syllabus's weights say it is, and the calculator above computes it correctly. What that passage tells you is that nominal weights and actual influence on class standing are not the same thing, which is why a 2-point improvement in one category is not interchangeable with a 2-point improvement in another.
This is the hinge between this page and the GPA calculator, and it is where most grade sites quietly invent a fact. There is no universal conversion from a course percentage to a letter grade, and therefore none to a grade point. Getting from 88.08% to a number that can go into a GPA needs two separate institution-specific tables, and the first of them is frequently not published at the university level at all.
The University of Kentucky answers this on a departmental FAQ, flatly: “grade cutoffs are established by each instructor for their course and are given in the course syllabus”, and “The University has a general grading system which outlines the expectations for each letter grade ... but does not establish any grade cutoffs based on points or percentages.” So the question “is 88% a B+?” has no institutional answer there. It has a syllabus answer.
Florida State University's Faculty Senate publishes a set of nine example grading-scale tables for course proposals. They are not variants of one scale; the threshold for an A ranges from 90% to 95% across them, and some have no plus or minus grades at all. Running two percentages through all nine:
Grade points shown on the plus/minus convention Indiana University and Duke publish. Letters derived from the nine FSU tables; the grade points are what those letters are worth under that convention.
A 0.7 spread in grade points, from one percentage, inside one university's own set of examples. The middle rows are the interesting ones: at 95% and 86% the scales agree and the conversion is safe, and near a boundary it is not. If your percentage is sitting at 90 or 93, you do not have a grade yet; you have a number whose grade depends on a table.
Pace University's catalogue does print percentage equivalents, and they map one band to several letters: “A, A-” together at “90-100%”, “B+, B, B-” together at “80-89%”, “C+, C” at “70-79%”. A 95% there is an A or an A-, which is 4.0 or 3.7, and the catalogue does not break the tie because it is not trying to: “These equivalents are shown only as guidelines for faculty. Specific grading policies should be announced by the instructor in a given course.”
Atlantic Cape Community College publishes the whole chain, percentage to letter to grade point, which makes it the clearest demonstration of the problem. Its standard scale runs A 93-100% at 4.0, A- 90-92% at 3.7, B+ 87-89% at 3.3, down through C 70-76% at 2.0 and D 60-69% at 1.0. The catalogue then says that scale “applies to all disciplines except Nursing (NURS), Culinary (CUBP, CULN, CULA), and specified Aviation flight” courses, and prints two more tables for those. In the Nursing scale, C is 75-76% and D is 60-74%.
Same college, same semester, same percentage, a whole grade point apart. No calculator can resolve that from the percentage alone, and any page that offers to is guessing.
The Illinois teaching centre puts the underlying problem better than we could. On converting percentages to grades: “Grades are usually assigned to percent scores using arbitrary standards similar to those set for grading on the curve, i.e., students with scores 93-100 get A's and 85-92 is a B, 78-84 is a C, etc. ... Should the cutoff for an A be 92 instead? Why not 90? What sound rationale can be given for any particular cutoff?” It goes on to note that cutoffs need not even be constant within one course: “It does seem defensible for the instructor to decide on cutoffs for each grading component, independent of the others, so that the scale for an A might be 93-100 for Exam No. 1, 88-100 for a paper, 87-100 for Exam No. 2 and 90-100 for the Final Exam.”
Which is the honest reason this page stops at a percentage. The percentage is something we can compute exactly from your inputs. The letter is your instructor's, and the grade point is your registrar's.
Each row here takes a single percentage for a whole category, and how that percentage was arrived at is left to you. That is a real limitation, not a formality, because the items inside a category usually have unequal point values.
Take a homework category holding five 10-point assignments you scored 10 out of 10 on, plus one 50-point project you scored 30 out of 50 on.
13.33 points apart, and only one of them is right for your course. Which one depends on how your instructor set the category up. If the project is meant to count five times as much as one homework, the first figure is yours. If every homework item counts equally regardless of size, the second is. The syllabus answers it and this page cannot.
Two cases, and the page behaves differently in each. If your weights add up to less than 100 because some categories are not graded yet, the provisional average is scaled over the graded weight and the two totals are shown separately, which is the behaviour described at the top of this page. If they add up to something other than 100 because of a typo or a missing row, the page still answers over whatever weight carries a score and prints a line saying what the total actually is.
In neither case does the page rescale your weights for you or decide which row is wrong. A total that is not 100 is a message that the rows and the syllabus have diverged, and the fix belongs in the rows.
Your letter grade. Covered at length above. It needs your syllabus's cutoffs, which this page has never seen.
Drop rules. Lowest quiz dropped, best three of four exams, a replacement rule where the final can override a midterm. Work the category out with the rule already applied and type the result.
Point weighting inside a category. One percentage per row, and the 13.33-point example above shows how much that can hide.
Curves and scaling. If the class mean is shifted, or a top score is normalised to 100, nothing you can type here reflects it.
Extra credit. The score field accepts a number, but a category over 100% is not something this page is designed around, and extra credit is often applied to a total rather than to a category.
Late penalties, academic-integrity penalties and instructor discretion. All real, none visible.
Rounding at the boundary. Whether an 89.5 becomes an A- is a decision, not arithmetic, and per the University of Kentucky's answer above it is the instructor's decision in most places. This page reports two decimals and rounds the second. Do not read 89.50% as a grade.
Every figure on this page was computed from the calculator's own arithmetic or read against the sources above on 1 October 2026. Nothing you type leaves your browser. More: the rest of the MyCampusKit tools.
Each category's score is multiplied by its weight, those products are added up, and the total is divided by the weight of the categories that actually have a score in them. With the figures this page starts with, homework 92 at 20 percent, quizzes 88 at 20 percent and a midterm 85 at 25 percent, that is 5,725 divided by 65, which is 88.08 percent. The unscored final is left out of both halves of the division, not treated as a zero.
No. It is the average of the 65 percent of the course that has been graded, and it will only stay at 88.08 if your final comes in at 88.08. Score the final at 80 and the course average is 85.25. At 70 it is 81.75. At 0 it is 57.25. A provisional average quietly assumes the ungraded work goes as well as the graded work has, which is exactly the assumption worth doubting the week before a final.
Those are two different claims and the page treats them differently. Blank means not graded yet, so that category's weight comes out of the denominator. Zero means a score of zero, so the weight stays in and drags the average down. On the starting figures the two answers are 88.08 and 57.25, which is a gap of 30.83 points on the same four rows.
The page still answers, scaled over the weight you have given scores to, and it prints a line telling you the total so the discrepancy is visible rather than silent. It does not rescale your weights to 100 for you. If your syllabus adds up to 100 and your rows do not, the typo is in the rows.
Not directly. Work the category out yourself first, leaving the dropped score out, then type the resulting percentage into that row. Drop rules are also why a running average in an online gradebook can be wrong for weeks: the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Canvas guidance notes that leaving assignments ungraded can adversely effect the performance of assignment group rules, such as dropping lowest or highest grades.
No, and the two cannot be converted into each other without two tables your institution owns. A course average is a percentage inside one course. A GPA is grade points across courses, weighted by credit hours. Turning the first into the second needs your instructor's percentage-to-letter cutoffs and then your registrar's letter-to-grade-point table, and neither is standard. On the nine example grading scales published by Florida State's Faculty Senate, 90 percent is a B plus on one, an A minus on six and an A on two.
No. The University of Kentucky states that grade cutoffs are established by each instructor for their course and are given in the course syllabus, and that the university does not establish any grade cutoffs based on points or percentages. Even where an institution does publish percentage bands, they may not be one-to-one: Pace University's catalogue puts A and A minus together in a single 90 to 100 percent band, and B plus, B and B minus together in 80 to 89 percent.
Usually one of four reasons. It weights the items inside a category by their point values while this page takes one percentage per category. It is showing a total that counts ungraded work as zero rather than a current grade that ignores it. A drop rule has or has not fired yet. Or a curve, a scaling factor or extra credit has been applied that no calculator can see. The syllabus and the instructor are the authority, in that order.
No. It is arithmetic on figures you supply. Rounding at the cutoff, late penalties, curves, participation marks awarded at the end and any discretion the instructor holds all sit outside it.