How do I calculate a test grade?

Divide the number of correct answers by the total number of questions and multiply by one hundred. Nineteen correct out of twenty-five is 19 divided by 25, which is 0.76, or 76 percent. The letter that percentage earns depends on the scale your school uses.

What is 19 out of 25 as a percentage?

76 percent, which is a C on the standard ten point scale and a C on a plus and minus scale as well. Each question on a twenty-five item test is worth four percent, so one more mistake would drop it to 72 percent.

Is 89.5 percent an A or a B?

That depends on whether your school rounds. On a strict ten point scale 89.5 is a B, because the A band starts at ninety. Many teachers round up and award the A. This calculator does not round, so it reports the B, and your syllabus or student handbook will say which convention applies to you.

Why is the same score a different letter at different schools?

Because there is no national grading scale in the United States. The common ten point scale puts an A at ninety, but the older seven point scale puts it at ninety-three, and it is still used by many districts and by nursing and pharmacy programmes. The percentage is arithmetic; the letter is school policy.

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How a test score becomes a percentage

The arithmetic is the easy part. Take the number of questions answered correctly, divide it by the number of questions on the paper, and multiply by a hundred. Nineteen right out of twenty-five is 0.76, which is 76 percent. What takes the time is doing that forty times in a row for a stack of papers, and that is the job this page was built for.

The figure worth paying attention to is not the score itself but what a single question is worth. On a twenty-five question test each item carries four percent, so one careless mistake moves the grade a full four points. On a hundred question test each item carries one percent and a single slip barely registers. This is why short quizzes feel so brutal and why a student can go from an A to a C on a ten question paper by misreading two lines. The calculator prints that per-question figure next to the result for exactly this reason.

Points-based tests work the same way. If the paper is out of forty points and eight were lost, put forty in the first box and eight in the second. Nothing in the maths cares whether the units are questions or points, only that both boxes are measured in the same thing.

Why the same percentage is a different letter in different schools

There is no national grading scale in the United States. Every district, and often every department inside a school, sets its own cut-offs, which is why a student who moves states can watch their letter grades shift without their work changing at all.

The ten point scale is the most common one: ninety and above is an A, eighty is a B, seventy a C, sixty a D. The seven point scale is older and stricter, and it survives in a lot of district policies and in health science programmes where a ninety-two is only a B. Nursing and pharmacy schools in particular are known for it, and students arriving from a ten point high school are often caught out in their first semester. The third option on this page splits each band into thirds so that an eighty-eight reads as a B plus rather than a flat B, which is what most transcripts actually print.

Switching the scale on this calculator changes the letter and nothing else. The percentage is arithmetic and does not have an opinion; the letter is policy, and policy varies.

Rounding, and the marks that sit on the line

A score of 89.5 percent is the single most argued-about number in any classroom. Some teachers round it to ninety and award the A. Others hold the line at a strict eighty-nine and give the B. Both are defensible, and neither is what the arithmetic says on its own, because rounding is a decision rather than a calculation.

This calculator does not round the percentage before it picks the letter. It works from the exact figure, so 89.5 percent returns a B on the standard scale. If your school rounds up, add the fraction yourself and you will see the letter change. It is worth knowing which convention your school uses before an argument rather than after, and it is usually written down in the course syllabus or the student handbook.

One more thing to watch for: a test is rarely the whole grade. A ninety-two on a quiz that counts for five percent of the course moves the final mark by less than half a point. If you want to know what a paper does to your overall standing rather than to itself, the class grade calculator handles weighting properly, and the final exam calculator tells you what a single remaining paper has to score.

Using the table when you are marking a set

Below the inputs the page prints every possible score for a paper of that length, from a perfect run down through twenty mistakes. Once you have set the number of questions once, you never have to touch the calculator again for that stack: read the number of crosses on the paper, find the row, write the grade. The row matching what you typed is highlighted so you can find your place again after looking away.

The table stops at twenty rows on purpose. Past that point the grades are all failing on any scale, and a hundred-row table is harder to read than the arithmetic it replaces.