How to Use This Tool
List your courses with grades and credit hours. The GPA is credit-weighted, and the panel next to it shows what you would get by averaging the grades directly, which is the common mistake.
A GPA is credit-weighted
The calculation is total quality points divided by total credits, where quality points are the grade value multiplied by the credits. A four-credit course with a B contributes 12 points; a two-credit course with the same B contributes 6.
So a poor grade in a large course hurts twice as much as the same grade in a small one, and an easy one-credit course barely moves anything. Averaging the grade values directly ignores this entirely, and the difference grows the more your courses vary in size.
The scales are not comparable
- Unweighted 4.0 — an A is 4.0 in every course. The maximum is 4.0 and a straight-A student gets exactly that.
- Weighted 5.0 — advanced courses are worth an extra point, so an A in an AP or IB course is 5.0. This is why some applicants report a GPA above 4.
- Plus/minus 4.3 — an A+ is 4.3, so the maximum exceeds 4.0 without any weighting at all.
These produce different numbers from identical work, which is why a GPA quoted without its scale means little. Most universities recalculate from the transcript using their own scale rather than accepting the figure on it, so optimising the number is less useful than it looks.
Cumulative and term GPA
A term GPA covers one term; a cumulative GPA covers everything. The cumulative one becomes progressively harder to move, because each new term is a smaller fraction of the total — which is the arithmetic behind the advice that first-year grades matter more than they feel like they should.
The calculator at the bottom works out what average you would need next term to reach a target cumulative figure. It will sometimes return a number above the scale maximum, which is the honest answer: the target is no longer reachable in one term.
Things this cannot know
- Your institution's exact grade values. Most use the values here, and some differ — a few give no credit below C, others exclude pass/fail courses from the calculation entirely.
- Repeat policies. Some institutions replace the original grade, some average both, some keep both on the transcript and count only the higher.
- Which courses count. Many universities recalculate using academic courses only, excluding physical education and electives.
Your registrar's published policy is authoritative. This is for planning, not for prediction.
