Grade Scale Converter
Put in a percentage, a letter, or a grade point. You get the other two, the range of scores that produce the same letter, and the same grade read against four published university scales side by side.
There is no standard conversion. This page shows you how far apart the real ones are.
The grade you have
Type it in whichever form you're holding it, and the other two are read off the table at the bottom of this page.
The same grade, three ways
89% is a B+, worth 3.3 grade points. Every score from 87 up to 90 is the same B+, and all of it is worth the same 3.3. That is what the conversion costs: your transcript records the letter, not the 89%. The next letter up, A-, started at 90 — 1 point away.
The same 89% on every scale this page ships
Two of these are published by universities, one is published by a university that publishes only half of it, and two are conventions nobody published at all. They do not agree.
| Scale | Letter | Grade points | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plus/minus convention | B+ | 3.3 | Common US convention, not an institution |
| Whole-letter convention | B | 3 | Common US convention, not an institution |
| Columbia SPS | B+ | 3.33 | Columbia University School of Professional Studies |
| UBC | A | — | University of British Columbia (Vancouver) Academic Calendar |
| Maryland | — | — | University of Maryland Office of the University Registrar |
89% comes out 3 different letters and 3 different grade point values across these five. Two dashes are not gaps in this page — they are columns those institutions genuinely do not publish. There is no conversion that is simply correct; there is only your school's.
The table everything above is read off
Start from one of these and type over anything that doesn't match your own. Clear a cell to say your school doesn't publish it — that is a real answer, and the page will stop pretending to know.
Plus/minus convention — A starts at 93. The scale most US syllabi land near, paired with the A+ = 4.0 point table. Widely used, published by nobody — which is why every cell below is editable.
| Letter | Starts at | Worth | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| A+ | 97% and up | ||
| A | 93% up to 97% | ||
| A- | 90% up to 93% | ||
| B+ | 87% up to 90% | ||
| B | 83% up to 87% | ||
| B- | 80% up to 83% | ||
| C+ | 77% up to 80% | ||
| C | 73% up to 77% | ||
| C- | 70% up to 73% | ||
| D+ | 67% up to 70% | ||
| D | 63% up to 67% | ||
| D- | 60% up to 63% | ||
| F | 0% up to 60% |
Covers is the percentage range that produces each letter, computed from the cut-offs beside it: a band runs from its own number up to the next one above, which it never reaches. That range is the reason the conversion only runs cleanly one way — a percentage gives you a letter, and a letter gives you back the band it came from, not the number.
Informational only — this is not an official conversion. No standard percentage-to-GPA scale exists in the United States; the tables here are the ones the named institutions publish plus two common conventions, and none of them governs your transcript. Your instructor sets the percentage cut-offs and your registrar sets what each letter is worth. If you need a converted GPA for an application, transfer, scholarship or credential evaluation, the receiving institution decides the conversion and its answer is the only one that counts. Nothing you type here leaves your browser.
How this is calculated
A percentage becomes a grade point in two steps, and neither one is arithmetic. Both are lookups against tables that institutions choose separately, which is the entire reason this page exists.
Step one — your instructor's tablepercentage → letter
Step two — your registrar's tableletter → grade points
Backwardsletter → a range of percentages, never one
The asymmetry in that third line is the honest part. Going forward, one score gives one letter. Going back, one letter gives a band — on the plus/minus convention a B+ covers 87% up to 90%, and every score in it is worth the same 3.3. The percentage that produced your grade was thrown away when the grade was recorded, and no conversion recovers it.
The worked example this page loads with
89% — one point under an A on the scale most US students assume. Read against the five tables this page ships, it comes out three different letters and three different grade point values:
| Scale | Letter | Grade points |
|---|---|---|
| Plus/minus convention | B+ | 3.3 |
| Whole-letter convention | B | 3 |
| Columbia SPS | B+ | 3.33 |
| UBC | A | — |
| Maryland | — | — |
The two dashes on the last two rows are not gaps in this page. UBC publishes percentage cut-offs and no 4.0 equivalents; Maryland publishes quality points and no percentages. Each of those universities publishes exactly half of the conversion, and no amount of arithmetic supplies the other half.
Where the scales actually disagree
Not evenly. Over much of the middle of the range the two US conventions and Columbia's published table land close together — the disagreement concentrates at three places, and all three are where it costs the most.
- At every boundary. A 90 is a flat A on a whole-letter scale and an A− on a plus/minus one: 4.0 against 3.7, for the same work.
- At the top. An A+ is worth 4.00 on Maryland's scale and 4.33 on Columbia SPS's. At 98% the two tables agree the grade is an A+ and disagree by a third of a point about what it is worth — so the letter matching tells you nothing about the grade points.
- Across the border. UBC's A starts at 85 and its passing grade at 50. A US office reading an 85 against a ten-point table sees a B. This is the single widest gap on the page, and it is the one most likely to be applied to a real transcript by someone else.
Some schools don't use the chain at all
The Seattle Colleges run it backwards: instructors record a decimal grade directly, and the letter is derived from the number rather than the other way round. “Passing grades range from 4.0 to 1.0; 0.0 is given for unsatisfactory performance,” with the deliberate hole that “no grades will be awarded in the range 0.1 − 0.9.” A student there holds a 3.4 as their actual course grade, not as something converted from one. This page can't model that table, and says so rather than pretending its letters are the primary record.
What it assumes
- A cut-off is inclusive of its own number. If the A− starts at 90 then 90.0 is an A−, and 89.99 is not. Some syllabi round before comparing and some compare before rounding; a course that rounds 89.5 up to 90 is applying a rule this page can't see. Type the rounded score if that's what your instructor uses.
- Bands don't overlap and the top one has no ceiling. Each letter runs from its own cut-off up to the next one above, which it never reaches. Above the highest cut-off there is no ceiling at all — extra credit doesn't create a new letter.
- A blank cell means “not published”, not zero. Clear the percentage column and the page stops answering questions asked in percentages, because that is the true state of most US registrars' published scales.
- One course at a time. This converts a single grade. Averaging several into a GPA is credit-weighted and belongs to the Cumulative GPA Calculator, which uses the same grade-point tables as this page.
Where this stops being right
- There is no US standard, and this page is not one either. The tables here are two conventions plus what three named institutions publish. None of them governs your transcript. The only authoritative pair of tables is your syllabus and your registrar's grading page.
- A converted GPA is decided by whoever receives it. Transfer offices, graduate admissions, scholarship committees and credential evaluators each apply their own scale, and they disagree with each other. If a conversion is going on an application, ask that office which table they use — the number on this page has no standing with them.
- Weighted high-school scales are a different question. An honors or AP bonus lands on top of the grade point after this conversion, and how big it is varies by district. That's the High School GPA Calculator's job.
- Marks that aren't grades don't convert. P, S, W, I and audit marks have no grade point by design — they're excluded from the average rather than counted as a zero. What a P does to a GPA is on the Pass/Fail Calculator.
- Your instructor and registrar own the real grade. This page computes what the table you gave it implies, and nothing more.
Sources
The lookups need no authority. What needs citing is the claim the page is built on: that published scales exist, that they disagree, and that most publish only one of the two columns a conversion requires.
Columbia University School of Professional Studies, Grades: “Grade point averages are computed on the following scale” — A+ 98–100% at 4.33, A 93–97.9% at 4.00, A− 90–92.9% at 3.67, B+ 87–89.9% at 3.33, down to D 60–69.9% at 1.00 and F below 59.9% at 0.00. The rare published table carrying both columns at once, and the one this page uses to show that an A+ is not universally 4.0.
University of British Columbia, Vancouver Academic Calendar — Grading Practices: “in most faculties, individual courses are normally graded as follows” — A+ 90–100, A 85–89, A− 80–84, B+ 76–79, B 72–75, B− 68–71, C+ 64–67, C 60–63, C− 55–59, D 50–54, F 0–49. Percentage cut-offs with no 4.0-scale column beside them, and cut-offs nothing like the US convention.
University of Maryland Office of the University Registrar, GPA Calculation: A+ and A both 4.0, A− 3.7, B+ 3.3, through to F 0.0, with “multiplying the quality points value by the number of credits for a particular course gives the number of quality points earned for that course.” No percentage equivalents appear anywhere on the page — the other half of the conversion, published by nobody at the university.
Seattle Colleges, Procedure 520, Grading: “Passing grades range from 4.0 to 1.0; 0.0 is given for unsatisfactory performance,” and “no grades will be awarded in the range 0.1 − 0.9,” with letters derived from the decimal grade rather than the reverse. The counter-example to the whole chain.
These are published, verifiable examples of scales in use, not the scale that governs your transcript. Your syllabus and your registrar publish the ones that do.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Frequently asked questions
How do you convert a percentage to a GPA?
In two steps, and neither of them is arithmetic. First the percentage becomes a letter on a cut-off table your instructor set — that table is on your syllabus, not published by your university. Then the letter becomes a grade point on a second table your registrar publishes. Because the two tables are chosen independently, the same score fans out: 89% is a B worth 3.0 on the whole-letter convention, a B+ worth 3.33 on Columbia SPS's published scale, and an A at the University of British Columbia, whose calendar gives no 4.0 equivalent at all. Any site that answers "89% = 3.3 GPA" with one number has quietly picked a table for you. Find yours — the cut-offs on your syllabus, the grade points on your registrar's GPA page — and type both into the table on this page.
What percentage is a 3.5 GPA?
There isn't one, for two separate reasons. The first is that a grade point is a band, not a point: on the plus/minus convention nothing is worth exactly 3.5 — a B+ is 3.3 and an A− is 3.7 — so a 3.5 cumulative GPA is an average of several courses, not a score anybody earned. The second is that even a single letter only ever converts back to a range. An A− covers 90% up to 93% on that convention, so the honest answer to "what percentage is an A−" is that range, and the specific percentage that produced it was discarded the moment the grade was recorded. At a university like Maryland, which publishes quality points and no percentage equivalents anywhere, there is no range to give either — the question has no institutional answer at all.
Is 90% an A or an A−?
Both, at different schools, and that single point is where most of the disagreement in US grading lives. On a whole-letter scale where an A starts at 90, a 90 is a flat A worth 4.0. On the plus/minus convention where an A− starts at 90 and an A at 93, the same 90 is an A− worth 3.7 — three tenths of a grade point lower for an identical piece of work. Neither is more correct. The cut-off that governs your course is the one printed on your syllabus, and instructors at the same university routinely use different ones, because in the US the university generally does not set them. Enter the numbers from your syllabus into the table on this page rather than accepting either default.
Do colleges convert my percentage to a 4.0 GPA?
The receiving institution does its own conversion, using its own table, and its answer is the only one that counts. Transfer offices, graduate admissions, scholarship committees and credential evaluators all publish or apply their own scales, and they frequently disagree with each other and with your home institution. This matters most if your grades are recorded as percentages — common in Canada and much of the world — because the conversion is then done entirely by a stranger. The University of British Columbia publishes percentage cut-offs where an A starts at 85; a US office reading that 85 against a ten-point table sees a B. Use this page to understand what your grade means and how wide the disagreement is, then ask the office that will actually decide which table they use.
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