The Exam Mark Scheme Grade Calculator turns a raw exam mark into the correct grade using the grade boundaries published in a mark scheme. Exam boards such as AQA, Edexcel, and OCR set boundaries as absolute marks after each session, so the same percentage can earn different grades depending on how hard the paper was. This tool lets you paste those boundaries and instantly classify any score.
How it works
A grade boundary is the minimum raw mark needed to reach a grade. The calculator sorts your boundaries from highest threshold to lowest, then walks down the list comparing the raw mark to each threshold. The first boundary your mark meets or exceeds is the grade awarded. For example, if grade A requires 80 marks and the student scored 82, they receive an A; if they scored 78 and the next boundary (B) is 70, they receive a B.
The percentage shown is simply raw mark / total marks × 100, displayed for context only. Grading always uses the raw marks, never the rounded percentage, which matters at the edges where one mark separates two grades.
Example and tips
Suppose a 100-mark paper has boundaries A=80, B=70, C=60, D=50. A student scoring 73 marks meets the B threshold (70) but not the A threshold (80), so the grade is B at 73.0 percent. Tips: enter boundaries highest-grade-first for readability, leave a row blank to skip a grade you do not need, and double-check the total marks field, because a wrong total only affects the displayed percentage, not the grade.