GPA Calculator

Your grade point average (GPA) is a weighted average of every grade you've earned, where each course counts in proportion to its credit hours. A 4-credit course pulls your GPA more than a 1-credit course does, which is why two students with the same letter grades can end up with different GPAs if their course loads were weighted differently.

This calculator uses the formula every US registrar uses in some form: add up each course's grade points (on the 4.0 scale) multiplied by its credit hours, then divide by the total credit hours across all your courses. Enter every course from a single term for a semester GPA, or every course you've ever taken for a cumulative GPA — the math is the same either way.

This is an unweighted calculation: it doesn't add bonus points for honors, AP, or IB courses the way some high schools' official weighted scales do, and it uses the standard +/- 4.0 point values rather than any institution-specific variation. Treat the result as a reliable estimate, and check your school's own published scale if you need an exact official figure.

A worked example

Say you took three courses in a term: an A- (3.7 points) in a 4-credit course, a B+ (3.3 points) in a 3-credit course, and a B (3.0 points) in another 3-credit course. Multiply each grade's points by its credit hours: 3.7 × 4 = 14.8, 3.3 × 3 = 9.9, and 3.0 × 3 = 9.0, for a total of 33.7 grade points. Divide by total credit hours (4 + 3 + 3 = 10): 33.7 ÷ 10 = 3.37 — the GPA this calculator would show for that term.

A common misconception

It's tempting to think of GPA as a simple average of your letter grades, but it isn't — it's a credit-weighted average, so a single 1-credit elective pulls far less than a 4-credit core course. Two students with the exact same set of letter grades can end up with different GPAs if those grades landed on courses of different sizes. It's also easy to forget that a syllabus's letter grade and its GPA-scale point value aren't the same number — the letter is what you see on a transcript, but it's the 4.0-scale conversion that actually drives the GPA math.

Special cases this calculator doesn't model

Many US high schools use a weighted scale on top of the base 4.0 system, adding bonus points for tougher courses — a common convention adds 0.5 points for Honors classes and 1.0 point for AP or IB classes, so an A in an AP course can count as a 5.0 instead of a 4.0. There's no single national standard for this: bonus amounts, which courses qualify, and whether weighting is used at all vary by district and school. This calculator always uses the unweighted 4.0 scale, so if your school weights grades, your official GPA may run higher than what you see here. Pass/fail courses are another common exception — most institutions exclude them from the GPA calculation entirely rather than assigning them a point value, so they generally shouldn't be entered here either.

How to use your result

A single term's GPA is most useful compared against your own past terms, not against an absolute target picked in isolation — it tells you whether your current course mix and performance are trending up, flat, or down. If you're trying to reach a specific cumulative GPA by graduation, work backward: figure out how many credit hours you have left and what average grade points across them would move your cumulative number to where you want it, rather than treating any single term's GPA as the whole picture.

GPA vs. class rank

GPA and class rank both summarize academic performance, but they measure different things. GPA is an absolute number based only on your own grades and credit hours — it doesn't change based on how anyone else in your class performed. Class rank is relative: it places your GPA against every other student's in the same cohort, so the same 3.37 GPA could be a strong rank at one school and a middling one at another, purely because of how the rest of that school's student body performed.