Enter all your quiz or assignment grades, select how many your professor drops, and instantly see your new average with the lowest score(s) removed — including letter grade and GPA.
Enter at least 2 grades above
A drop-lowest policy lets a professor remove your worst score before calculating your quiz or assignment average. It is designed to protect students from one bad day — an illness, a family emergency, or simply an off week — without it permanently damaging their grade.
The most common application is quiz grades: a professor might say "I will drop your lowest 2 quiz scores at the end of the semester." This means you can perform poorly once or twice without it counting against your final average, as long as the rest of your quiz scores are solid.
Importantly, drop-lowest policies typically apply within a specific grade category (e.g., quizzes only), not to all your assignments. Check your syllabus carefully — the policy will state which assignments are eligible for drops and how many will be dropped.
In rare cases, dropping your lowest grade can actually lower your average — even though that sounds impossible. This happens when your "lowest" score is still higher than your overall average.
The backfire scenario only occurs if your professor applies drops inconsistently — for example, the gradebook drops a score that happens to be above your average due to a technical or manual error. This is why checking your gradebook manually with this calculator is always worthwhile.
Drop policies almost always apply to one specific category — usually quizzes or homework — not to exams, projects, or the final. Never assume your lowest exam will be dropped; check the syllabus.
Some students deliberately skip a quiz thinking it will be "dropped anyway." A 0% is always the worst possible score and will be the one dropped — but if you miss another quiz too, you now have two zeros competing to be dropped, wasting your drop allowance on absences instead of genuine low scores.
Enter ALL your scores including the low one. The calculator identifies and removes the lowest automatically. If you manually exclude it before entering, you will see the wrong result.
Some professors replace the lowest quiz grade with your final exam score (if the final is higher) rather than simply removing it. These are different calculations. "Drop" means remove entirely; "replace" means substitute another score. Confirm which policy applies to your course.
If you have one drop and use it on a 72% early in the semester, then get seriously ill mid-term and score 45% on a quiz, you have no drop left. Treat your drop allowance as insurance, not a planned skip.
Learning management systems like Canvas and Blackboard apply drop policies automatically but sometimes flag the wrong score. Run your scores through this calculator to verify your gradebook is dropping the correct assignment.
If your professor offers both a drop policy and extra credit, you have two grade-recovery tools. Use the drop for your worst individual score, and use our Extra Credit Calculator to see how bonus points can push your final grade over a boundary.
Explore more free grade tools from GradePilot.