Loading Percentage to Letter Grade…
Ten percentage points per letter with plus and minus grades carved out of each one. Common across North American colleges, and the arrangement most people picture when they say “the grading scale”.
B+
87% to under 90%, and this mark is exactly on the cut-off
| Letter | From | Points | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 97% and above | |||
| 93% to under 97% | |||
| 90% to under 93% | |||
| 87% to under 90% | |||
| 83% to under 87% | |||
| 80% to under 83% | |||
| 77% to under 80% | |||
| 73% to under 77% | |||
| 70% to under 73% | |||
| 67% to under 70% | |||
| 63% to under 67% | |||
| 60% to under 63% | |||
| 0% to under 60% |
Boundaries are set by the institution, and often by the department or the individual instructor inside it. The tables offered above are the arrangements you meet most often, not a standard anybody is obliged to follow, so check the figures against your own syllabus and type over anything that disagrees. Every cut-off in the table is editable for exactly that reason.
Each band runs from its own starting mark up to the start of the band above, and a mark landing precisely on a cut-off takes the higher letter. Whether your institution agrees is a real question: some apply the cut-offs to a rounded mark and some to an unrounded one, which is the whole argument over whether 89.5 is an A.
Ask three institutions where a B starts and you can get 80, 83 and 85. The ten-point arrangement, split into thirds by plus and minus grades, is the most familiar in North America, but a seven-point table is standard across plenty of school districts, and inside a single university one department will hand out an A at 90 while another wants 93. Whole systems dispense with the letters entirely.
So the table on this page is editable in every cell. Presets are offered as starting points, and each one names what it is rather than claiming to be the standard. Copy the cut-offs off your own syllabus, type them in, and the conversion above follows them.
Each band runs from its own starting mark up to the start of the band above it, and the boundary belongs to the higher band. A mark of exactly 87 on the ten-point table is a B plus, not a B, and it appears in one row rather than in two. That convention matches how cut-offs are normally written — “87 and above” — and the tool flags when the mark you entered is sitting precisely on one.
The perennial argument over whether 89.5 earns an A is not really about the boundary at all; it is about whether the mark is rounded before the boundary is applied. Round to the nearest whole number first and 89.5 becomes 90, which clears an A. Apply the cut-off to the unrounded figure and it does not. Both practices are widespread, and neither can be deduced from the grading table itself.
Converting a letter into a percentage is a lossy operation, because the letter was a bucket. A B on the ten-point table means somewhere between 83 and 87, and nothing recovers where inside that span the work actually sat. The table shows the span each letter covers for exactly that reason, and any single figure quoted as the percentage equivalent of a letter is a convention rather than a measurement.
This is also why converting a grade point back into a mark is guesswork. The most a scale can honestly say is which range a letter came from.
A UK undergraduate classification carves the range at 70, 60, 50 and 40, so a mark in the seventies is a first-class result rather than the mediocre grade the same figure suggests elsewhere. The European ECTS grades were designed as relative positions within a cohort, meaning the top fraction of a class receives the top grade whatever the raw marks were. Neither can be mapped onto a letter table by arithmetic alone.
The one your institution documents, and none of them if it publishes something different. Presets exist to save typing thirteen rows, not to settle where a boundary belongs, so check the first cut-off against your syllabus before trusting the rest.
It depends entirely on the institution. Many cap the top value at 4.0, so an A plus is recognition without extra credit; others award 4.3, which is how an unweighted average can creep above four. The points column is editable for that reason.
Not by arithmetic. A 68 is a strong upper second in Britain and would read as a D on a ten-point American table, because the two systems use the range differently. Any equivalence between them is a policy decision made by the receiving institution.
Because it does not silently correct your input. If two rows share a letter, or a gap is left at the bottom of the range, the problem is described in plain terms and left for you to fix rather than repaired behind your back.