About SyllabusCalc

What this site is

SyllabusCalc is a small collection of grade calculators for students, teachers, and parents. Each tool answers one question a student actually types during the semester — what do I need on the final, what letter is this percent — and each is paired with a plain-English guide that works the math end to end with real numbers.

Who runs it

SyllabusCalc is maintained by one person. It is not run by an academic advisor, a registrar, or a school, and nothing here should be read as though it were: what the site does is arithmetic, carefully, and then it shows the work so you do not have to take anyone’s word for it. The tools, the guides and the tests are produced under that person’s direction; how this site is made has the details. The contact address reaches the person who runs the site.

That is a limited claim to authority, so the site is built to need very little of it. The three sections below are the standard the site holds itself to, and each one is checkable from outside: run the arithmetic yourself, follow the source links, or read the page that says plainly what the tool will not do.

How the math is verified

Grade math is pure arithmetic, which means every number a tool prints can be re-derived independently — and the site is built so that it is, twice.

• Every calculator has a mirror. Before a tool ships, its logic is reimplemented from scratch in a separate Python program that never imports the site's JavaScript. The mirror asserts the tool's output on ordinary inputs, on boundary scores, on impossible targets, on already-secured targets, and on malformed input, and it reproduces the browser's own rounding behaviour rather than Python's, because a half-point that rounds differently is a wrong grade.
• The mirrors read the real tables. Where a tool carries a constant table — a letter ladder, a percentage band, a classification boundary — the mirror extracts that table out of the JavaScript source and asserts it matches its own copy. A silent edit to a grading scale fails the build.
• The published numbers are tested too. Every worked example printed in a guide is an assertion in that mirror. There are 8,451 assertions in all across 34 mirror suites today — arithmetic, the published tables the calculators carry, and the site's own claims about itself — listed suite by suite on the test page, and the pre-deploy gate refuses to package the site if a single one fails, if the total falls below the floor the gate carries, or if the number in this sentence stops matching what the suites actually ran.
• The gate checks the pages, not just the math. The same step re-resolves every internal link on disk, re-parses every structured-data block, and re-checks that each tool page's visible questions and answers match its structured-data copy word for word.

Where the outside facts come from

Grading conventions are not arithmetic, and the site does not treat them as though they were. When a page states what a real institution or a real regulation says, that page links the institution's own page or the regulation's text — the calculator as well as the guide beside it, so no claim sits more than one click from its source: the University of Missouri and Indiana University registrars for the standard 4.0 ladder, Simon Fraser, Thompson Rivers, Kwantlen and Douglas College for the 4.33 one, United States University's policy manual and the North Carolina State Board's 10-point decision as it was reported in 2014 for percentage bands, 19 TAC §74.26 and New York's diploma requirements for passing lines, 34 CFR 600.2 for the credit hour. Two exceptions to that rule, both stated rather than silent. Where no stable public URL exists for a document, the page names the document and links the closest thing that is stable — the North Carolina board republishes its policy at an address that changes with each revision, so the decision is cited through the news report of it, and Fairfax County Public Schools' server refuses every automated request, so the same +0.5 and +1.0 weighting is linked at Seattle Public Schools instead. And a card in the tool or guide directory summarizes the page it links rather than re-citing it. Where a rule has a known expiry — New York's Regents requirement, for one — the page says so and dates the check. Nothing on this site quotes a school policy that has not been read at its source. The same pre-deploy gate keeps a dated log of every outbound URL on the site, and each link is re-checked wherever the linked site's robots.txt and bot defenses allow it. Where they rule out a re-check, the link stays on the page, flagged in the log with the date it was last confirmed. The gate refuses to package a release if any page cites a URL that has never been confirmed, or one whose latest check failed.

What this site deliberately does not do

• It does not invent policy. Grading scales, rounding rules, and honor cutoffs vary by school. Defaults here are labeled as conventions, scales are editable, and every page says the same thing: your syllabus wins.
• It does not give advice. Calculator, not counselor. Whether to take a class pass/fail, how a W affects an application, what a scholarship requires — those are questions for your school, and no arithmetic page should pretend otherwise.
• It does not dress up estimates. When a target grade is mathematically out of reach, the tools say so instead of printing an impossible score as if it were a plan.
• It does not want your data. The calculators run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, because there is no server-side collection to send it to — see the privacy policy.

Corrections

If a number on this site is wrong, that is a bug worth reporting. Write to the address on the contact page with the tool, the inputs, and what you expected. A confirmed arithmetic error is fixed the same way every time: the wrong number becomes a failing assertion in that tool's mirror first, then the fix makes it pass, so the same mistake cannot come back. If a correction changes what a page claims, the page's modified date moves with it.