GPA Calculator
Your grade point average for a term, on the 4.0 scale. Add a row for each course with its credit hours and letter grade, mark the honors and AP classes, and get the unweighted and weighted figures side by side — because only one of them means anything outside your school.
Your courses this term
Both are worked out either way — this only picks which one is the big number. Weighted adds the honors and AP bonuses your school may apply; unweighted is the figure that means the same thing everywhere.
4 courses over 14 credits, earning 49.00 quality points. Your weighted GPA is 3.50 on the same courses.
- Unweighted GPA
- 3.50
- Weighted GPA
- 3.50
- Grading scale
- Plus/minus
- Total credits
- 14
- Quality points
- 49.00
| Course | Credits | Grade points | Quality points | Weighted grade points | Weighted quality points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biology | 4 | 3.7 | 14.80 | 3.7 | 14.80 |
| Calculus | 4 | 3.3 | 13.20 | 3.3 | 13.20 |
| English | 3 | 4.0 | 12.00 | 4.0 | 12.00 |
| History | 3 | 3.0 | 9.00 | 3.0 | 9.00 |
How a grade point average is built
A GPA is not an average of letters. It is an average of grade points weighted by credit hours, which is why two students with identical report cards can have different GPAs.
qᵢ = pointsᵢ × creditsᵢ • GPA = Σqᵢ ÷ Σcreditsᵢ- pointsᵢ
- The 4.0-scale value of the letter — 4.0 for an A, 3.7 for an A−, down to 0 for an F
- creditsᵢ
- Credit hours for course i, which is how much the course counts
- qᵢ
- Quality points — the currency a GPA is actually kept in
The weighted version changes one thing: before multiplying, an honors course gets +0.5 and an AP or IB course gets +1.0. A failed course gets neither, here and at most schools — an F earns no quality points at all, and adding a bonus on top of zero would produce a weighted GPA that rewards failing the hardest classes.
Everything else about the weighting is local policy. There is no national scale, no standards body, and no agreement on what qualifies as honors. That is why both numbers appear above and why the unweighted one is the one to quote when a form does not say which it wants.
The pointsᵢtable itself has two versions in the advanced options. Plus/minus, the default, gives a plus 0.3 more than the bare letter and a minus 0.3 less. Standard drops that distinction: every plus or minus collapses onto its base letter’s points, the same shape a school with no plus/minus policy grades on. Switching the toggle recomputes both the unweighted and weighted GPA from the same courses — nothing else about the formula above changes.
The target-GPA plan, also in the advanced options, solves the same formula for a number that has not happened yet. Call the quality points and credits already entered Σqᵢ and Σcreditsᵢ, a target overall GPA g, and the credits still to come c. Reaching g needs
needed = (g × (Σcreditsᵢ + c) − Σqᵢ) ÷ con average across those future credits — the credit-weighted mean above, rearranged for the one span of the transcript that is not written yet. The unweighted scale tops out at 4.0, so a result above that is flagged as out of reach rather than printed as an instruction; a result at or below zero means the goal is already banked.
One term, four courses, three different answers
Biology, 4 credits, A− → 3.7 × 4 = 14.8 quality points. Calculus, 4 credits, B+ → 3.3 × 4 = 13.2. English, 3 credits, A → 4.0 × 3 = 12. History, 3 credits, B → 3.0 × 3 = 9. That is 49 quality points across 14 credits, and 49 ÷ 14 = 3.50.
Now say Biology was AP and Calculus was honors. The bonuses lift them to 4.7 and 3.8 grade points, so those two courses carry 18.8 and 15.2 quality points instead. The total becomes 55, and 55 ÷ 14 = 3.93. Same report card, same courses, 0.43 of a grade point apart — and a student at a school that weights nothing would report 3.50 for identical work.
Where you take a bad grade matters more than taking one
Add a C to that term and watch where it lands. A C in a one-credit elective adds 2 quality points and 1 credit: 51 ÷ 15 = 3.40, a drop of a tenth. The same C in a four-credit course adds 8 points and 4 credits: 57 ÷ 18 = 3.17, a drop of a third. Identical letter, triple the damage, and the only difference is the credit hours beside it.
What GPA does the rest of your transcript need?
Back to the original term: 49 quality points over 14 credits, a 3.50. Say this student has 16 credits left before graduation and wants to finish at an overall 3.70. The target-GPA plan in the advanced options solves (3.70 × 30 − 49) ÷ 16 = 3.875 — just under a 3.9 average across every remaining course, and comfortably inside the 4.0 ceiling, so the plan reports it as reachable. Aim for a perfect 4.00 instead and the same arithmetic asks for (4.00 × 30 − 49) ÷ 16 = 4.4375, which no string of grades can pay out on a 4.0 scale — the plan reports that one as out of reach rather than printing a number nobody can act on.
Why you cannot average your term GPAs
This page computes a term GPA: the courses in front of you, and nothing else. A cumulative GPA is every course on your record pooled into one calculation — all the quality points you have ever earned, divided by all the credits you have ever attempted.
Those are not the same thing, and averaging term GPAs to get a cumulative one is wrong whenever the terms differ in size. Take a 4.00 across 3 credits in a summer session and a 2.00 across 15 credits in the autumn. The average of the two GPAs is 3.00. The real cumulative figure is (12 + 30) ÷ 18 = 2.33. Two thirds of a grade point of wishful thinking, from arithmetic that looks reasonable.
To roll a term into your record properly you need the credits and GPA already on it, which is a different set of inputs — the cumulative GPA calculator takes them.
What this calculator assumes
- The 4.0 scale, with a plus worth +0.3 and a minus worth −0.3, and an A capped at 4.0. Schools that award 4.3 for an A+ are adding a local premium; enter an A+ as an A.
- Honors adds 0.5 and AP or IB adds 1.0 in the weighted column. These are the most common US conventions, not a standard, and your school handbook outranks them.
- A failed course earns no bonus, however hard it was. Its grade points are zero in both columns.
- Credit hours drive the weighting. If your school records course lengths some other way — units, periods, Carnegie units — enter that number consistently and the ratios still hold.
- Pass/fail courses are excluded from both the quality points and the credits. Leave them off the list, or give them zero credits.
- One term at a time. Nothing here knows what is already on your transcript, and a cumulative GPA is not the average of these.
- Figures are rounded only for display, to two decimal places. A school that truncates rather than rounds can differ from this page in the second decimal — which matters when a scholarship threshold is written there.
- Plus/minus is the default grading scale. Switching to Standard in the advanced options does not change which letters you can enter — it changes what they are worth, collapsing every plus and minus onto its base letter for schools that do not grade that finely.
- The target-GPA plan solves against the unweighted GPA only, never the weighted one, and it treats every future credit as equally easy or hard to earn — it has no way to know how many of the courses still to come will turn out to be honors or AP.
GPA calculator FAQ
Do colleges want my weighted or unweighted GPA?
Frequently neither as you report it. A great many admissions offices recalculate the number themselves from the course-by-course transcript, and they do it their own way: some count only academic core subjects and throw out PE and electives, some strip the weighting entirely so every applicant is on one scale, some add back their own bonus for AP and IB. That is not distrust, it is arithmetic self-defence — the weighted figures arriving from thousands of high schools were computed under thousands of different rules. Report what your school reports, keep the unweighted number handy, and expect the reader to recompute.
Does a pass/fail course change my GPA?
No, in either direction. A passed course normally earns credit toward graduation and no quality points, and it is left out of the GPA entirely — out of the total quality points and out of the credits they are divided by. So a P cannot rescue a bad term and cannot dilute a good one. That symmetry is the whole point of the option. In this calculator, either leave the course off the list or enter it with zero credits, which comes to the same answer.
How do I get my cumulative GPA from this?
Not by averaging your term GPAs — that is only right when every term carried the same number of credits, which is almost never. A cumulative GPA re-pools everything: add up the quality points from every term on your record, add up all the credits, and divide once. A 4.0 across 3 credits in a summer term does not offset a 2.0 across 15 credits in the autumn, and averaging 4.0 with 2.0 to get 3.0 overstates the outcome by half a grade point.
Why does my transcript show a different number?
Check three things in order. First, the scale: plenty of schools run a 5.0 weighted scale, or award 4.3 for an A+, or do not use pluses and minuses at all. Second, what is included: repeated courses, transfer credits, and pass/fail lines are all handled by local policy. Third, rounding — a school that truncates 3.4987 to 3.49 and one that rounds it to 3.50 disagree at the second decimal, and scholarship cutoffs are written at exactly that precision.
Do plus and minus grades matter much?
More than students expect over a full transcript. On this scale a plus adds 0.3 and a minus subtracts 0.3, so a B+ and a B− are 0.6 apart — two thirds of the distance between a B and an A. Four courses that slip from B+ to B− cost roughly 0.6 off a term GPA. Some schools do not use them at all, in which case every B is a flat 3.0 and the arithmetic gets kinder in both directions.
Is an A in a one-credit class as good as an A in a four-credit class?
For your GPA, no — it is worth a quarter as much. Quality points are grade points times credit hours, so a 4.0 in a one-credit elective adds 4 points and a 4.0 in a four-credit science adds 16. This is the most useful thing to know when you are deciding where to spend the last hours of a term: the heavy courses move the number, and the light ones barely register.
What is the difference between the standard and plus/minus GPA scales?
Plus/minus, the default above, gives a plus 0.3 more than the bare letter and a minus 0.3 less — an A− is 3.7, a B+ is 3.3. Standard drops that distinction entirely: every plus or minus you enter collapses onto its base letter, so an A− and an A+ both count as a flat 4.0. Neither is more correct; it depends on which one your school actually grades on. If your transcript never shows a plus or a minus, switch to Standard in the advanced options and the numbers above will match what your registrar computes, not what this page defaults to.
How is the GPA I need over my remaining credits worked out?
The advanced options let you enter a target overall GPA and the credits you have left, and the calculator solves the same credit-weighted formula backwards: it takes the quality points your entered courses already banked, works out how many more you would need to reach the target across every credit — entered and future — and divides that by the credits still to come. If the answer is at or below zero, you have already secured the target. If it comes out above 4.0, no run of grades can reach it on the unweighted scale, and the calculator says so rather than printing a number you cannot act on.
Why does the target-GPA plan use my unweighted GPA, not the weighted one?
Because a weighted target depends on courses that have not happened yet. The bonus for honors and AP is set course by course, so a weighted goal would silently assume how many of your future classes turn out to be honors or AP — a guess this calculator will not make for you. The unweighted scale has a fixed ceiling of 4.0 no matter what those future courses are, which is what makes 'not reachable' a claim you can trust rather than a guess dressed up as one.
Sources and review notes
- NCES High School Transcript Study — the federal study that collects real transcripts and recomputes a standardised GPA from the course records, because the reported figures are not comparable as they arrive
- National Association for College Admission Counseling — the professional body whose State of College Admission reporting covers how grades and course rigour are weighed in admissions
- University of Missouri Office of the University Registrar — Grading System — the published plus/minus scale this calculator defaults to, A through A− at 3.7 down to D− at 0.7
- Texas A&M University Student Rules, Rule 10 (Grading), §10.3 — the standard whole-letter scale this calculator offers as an alternative, with no plus or minus in the GPA
The arithmetic here is a credit-weighted mean and cannot go stale. What varies, constantly and by design, is everything around it: the points a letter is worth, the bonus a course level earns, which courses count at all. Every one of those is set by your school, and the first source above exists precisely because they differ.