How the weighted grade calculator works
Most syllabi split your grade into categories — something like homework 20%, quizzes 20%, exams 60%. Your overall grade isn't the plain average of those three numbers; it's a weighted average, where each category grade counts in proportion to its weight. A 95 in homework is nice, but with exams worth three times as much, a 78 on exams will dominate the result.
Enter each category's grade and its weight from the syllabus. If your weights don't total 100 — say, the final project hasn't been graded yet — the calculator warns you and computes the average over the weights you did enter, which is your true standing on the graded portion of the course.
The formula
Each category grade is your percentage in that category, each weight is the category's share of the course grade, and Σ means "sum across all categories entered." When weights total exactly 100, the denominator is simply 100.
Worked example
Say your syllabus weights are Homework 20%, Quizzes 20%, Exams 60%, and your grades are 92%, 84%, and 78% respectively:
Grade = (92×20 + 84×20 + 78×60) ÷ (20 + 20 + 60) = (1,840 + 1,680 + 4,680) ÷ 100 = 82%
Even though your grades average 84.7 on paper, the heavy exam weight drags the real grade down to 82 — a B−. That gap is exactly why weighted grades surprise people.
The mid-semester trick: partial weights
You don't have to wait until everything is graded. If only homework (20%) and quizzes (20%) have grades so far — say 90 and 80 — enter just those two rows. The calculator computes (90×20 + 80×20) ÷ 40 = 85%: your standing on the graded 40% of the course. That's more honest than pretending the ungraded 60% is a zero or a hundred. It also tells you something actionable: the remaining 60% (your exams) will count one and a half times as much as everything you've done so far, so the course is still very much winnable — or losable.