Displaying Letter Grades

Some teachers use Excel worksheets to calculate grades for students. Doing so is quite easy, as you sum the results of various student benchmarks (quizzes, tests, assignments, etc.) and then apply whatever calculation is necessary to arrive at a final numeric grade.

If you do this, you may wonder how you can convert the numeric grade to a letter grade. For instance, you may have a grading scale defined where anything below 52 is an F, 52 to 63 is a D, 64 to 74 is a C, 75 to 84 is a B, and 85 to 99 is an A.

There are several ways that a problem such as this can be approached. First of all, you could use nested IF functions within a cell. For example, let's assume that a student's numeric grade is in cell G3. You could use the following formula to convert to a letter grade based on the scale shown above:

=IF(G3<52,"F",IF(G3<64,"D",IF(G3<75,"C",IF(G3<85,"B","A"))))

To eliminate the need to nest the IF statements, you could also use the IFS function, which was introduced in Excel 2019:

=IFS(G3>=85,"A",G3>=75,"B",G3>=64,"C",G3>=52,"D",G3<52,"F")

While an approach based on IF or IFS will work just fine, if you need to change your grading scale, that means you need to change quite a few formulas.

A different approach that is also more flexible is to use XLOOKUP. This approach will only work if you are using Excel 2021 or a later version, though. Start by setting up a grading table in cells M3:N7. In cell M3 you place the lowest possible score, which would be a zero. To its right, in cell N3, you place the letter grade for that score: F. In M4 you place the lowest score for the next highest grade (53) and in N4 you place the corresponding letter grade (D). When you are done putting in all five grade levels, and assuming that the student's numeric grade is still in cell G3, you can use the following formula:

=XLOOKUP(G3, M3:M7, N3:N7, , -1)

If you are not using a version of Excel that supports XLOOKUP, you could use VLOOKUP to return the letter grade. In fact, in some ways this works even better than XLOOKUP. Select the grading table you created (M3:N7) and give it a name, such as GradeTable. (How you name a range of cells is covered in other issues of ExcelTips.) Now you can use this formula to return a letter grade:

=VLOOKUP(M22,GradeTable,2)

The beauty of using a lookup function (such as XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP) is that if you decide to change the grading scale, all you need to do is change the lower boundaries of each grade in the grading table. Excel takes care of the rest and recalculates all the letter grades for your students.

When you put together your grading table, it is also important that you have the grades—those in the GradeTable—go in ascending numeric order, from lowest to highest. Failure to do so will result in the wrong formula results.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (9700) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Displaying Letter Grades.