Calculate your new average after dropping your lowest quiz, homework, or test scores — enter your scores and how many of the lowest ones to drop.
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Many instructors build a little forgiveness into their grading policy by automatically dropping a student's lowest one or two quiz, homework, or test scores before calculating the average — a way of accounting for a single bad day, a missed assignment, or a topic that just didn't click, without letting it drag down an otherwise strong overall grade. This calculator lets you check your own average under that exact policy: enter every score you've received, specify how many of the lowest ones your instructor's policy drops, and it sorts your scores from lowest to highest, removes exactly that many from the bottom, and averages what's left. It also shows you your original average (with nothing dropped) side by side, along with exactly which scores were dropped and which were kept, so you can see precisely how much of a difference the drop policy makes for your grade. Because removing a below-average score can only raise (or leave unchanged) the average of what remains, this calculation always works in your favor — never against it.
A "drop the lowest score" policy is one of the most common forms of built-in grading forgiveness, showing up everywhere from weekly quiz sequences to homework sets to lab reports, and for good reason: it acknowledges, quietly and automatically, that everyone has an off day, gets sick before a quiz, or completely misjudges what a particular assignment was asking for — without requiring a student to request an exception or an instructor to make a judgment call about which excuses are legitimate.
The mechanics are simple once you see them written out: collect every score in the relevant category (say, all ten weekly quizzes), sort them from lowest to highest, and remove the specified number from the bottom of that sorted list before computing the average of what remains. If a policy says "your lowest quiz score is dropped," that means exactly one score — whichever happens to be lowest — is excluded, and the remaining nine are averaged normally. A policy that drops the two lowest excludes exactly two scores, even if three scores happen to be tied for lowest; only two of those tied values come out.
This policy interacts in an interesting way with test-taking strategy: because only your worst performance is protected, and only up to the stated limit, the safest approach is still to treat every scored item as if it counts, since you generally don't know in advance which one (if any) will end up being your lowest. A drop policy is meant to absorb one genuine bad outcome, not to give a student license to intentionally skip or tank an assignment — a policy that drops one lowest score offers zero additional protection if you deliberately skip two.
It's also worth understanding what a drop policy does not do: it doesn't reweight the remaining scores, apply any kind of curve, or change how any individual remaining score is graded. It simply removes the specified number of lowest raw scores from the dataset entirely before a completely ordinary average is calculated on what's left — which is exactly the calculation this tool performs. Because the excluded scores by definition sit below the group's average, taking them out mathematically guarantees the new average is at least as high as the original, and typically noticeably higher when the dropped scores were meaningfully lower than the rest.
If your course syllabus states a drop-lowest policy but you're unsure of the exact count, or whether it applies per-category (quizzes separately from homework, for example) rather than across everything combined, the safest step is to check the syllabus wording directly or ask your instructor — this calculator will accurately compute the result for whatever count and whatever set of scores you enter, but it can't know your specific course's policy on its own.
It's a built-in buffer for a bad day — a missed quiz, an illness, or one assignment that just didn't go well. By automatically excluding the lowest one or two scores from the average, the policy keeps a single off day from disproportionately hurting a grade that's otherwise consistently strong.
The calculator sorts all your entered scores from lowest to highest, removes the number of lowest scores you specified, and then computes the plain average (sum divided by count) of the scores that remain.
If you ask to drop one score and two scores are tied for lowest, only one of those tied values is removed — the calculator drops exactly the number of individual score entries you specify, regardless of ties.
No — you must keep at least one score to compute an average, so the number of scores you drop has to be smaller than the total number of scores you entered.
It will always raise your average or leave it unchanged — removing a below-average score can only pull the remaining average up (or keep it exactly the same in the unlikely case the dropped score exactly equals the average), never down.