GPA Calculator
Calculate your grade point average from course letter grades and credit hours, with weighted and unweighted options and school-specific caveats.
Grade Point Average · 0 credits
Most of your raw score does not affect your GPA at all
A GPA is built from letter grades, and letter grades are buckets. That has an effect students feel and rarely see measured. Sweeping the whole 50–99% range and asking what one extra percentage point does to the grade points for that course:
| Scale | Range where +1% changes nothing | Largest jump from +1% |
|---|---|---|
| Straight letters | 92% | 1.0 grade points |
| With pluses and minuses | 78% | 0.7 grade points |
On a straight A/B/C/D/F scale, 92% of the raw range moves the number by nothing whatsoever. The remaining 8% is cliff edge, where a single point can move a course by a full grade point. Adding pluses and minuses does not remove that structure, it just cuts the cliffs into smaller ones — the biggest jump falls from 1.0 to 0.7.
Which produces two opposite effects at once
Bucketing makes the GPA wildly oversensitive in some places and completely blind in others. Both follow from the same fact, and they are worth seeing side by side, because either one on its own reads as a complaint while both together are simply a description of what the number is.
| Two students | Raw difference | GPA difference |
|---|---|---|
| 89.9% in every course vs 90% | 0.1 points | 1.00 |
| 80.0% in every course vs 89.9% | 9.9 points | 0.00 |
A tenth of a percentage point is worth a full GPA point. Ten percentage points are worth nothing. Both students in the second row have a 3.0, and one of them is 9.9 points ahead in every single course.
The reason is just the width of a bucket. A B on the straight scale covers everything from 80% to 90% — a 10-point window — and where inside that window you sat is not recoverable from the transcript. It is the same width that makes the cliff at the edge so steep.
How to read a GPA, then
None of this makes the number useless. Compressing a transcript into one figure is a real and useful thing to do, and no summary survives without discarding something. It does mean two specific readings are unsafe.
Small differences are not small differences in performance. A 3.4 against a 3.5 could be a hair's breadth or could be substantial; the number does not carry that information. And equal GPAs are not equal performance — two transcripts averaging 82% and 91% can produce exactly the same figure, which is a nine-point gap sitting invisibly inside one number.
The practical version for a student: if you are near a boundary, that one course is worth more than everything else combined, and if you are in the middle of a band, extra marks in that course are worth precisely zero to your GPA. That is not a good incentive structure, but it is the one the arithmetic creates, and it is better to know where you are standing on it.
How to use
- Enter each course with its grade and credit hours.
- Choose weighted or unweighted.
- Read your GPA.
- Check your institution's own scale, which may differ.
Frequently asked questions
How is GPA calculated?
Each grade converts to a point value, is multiplied by the course's credit hours, and the total is divided by the total credits. Credit weighting is why a poor grade in a four-credit course hurts more than the same grade in a one-credit course.
What is the difference between weighted and unweighted?
Unweighted caps at 4.0 regardless of course difficulty. Weighted adds a bonus for honours or advanced courses, so a weighted GPA can exceed 4.0. Schools differ on the size of the bonus and which courses qualify, which makes weighted GPAs hard to compare between institutions.
Do plus and minus grades count?
At most institutions yes, typically adding or subtracting a third of a point — so a B plus is 3.3 and a B minus 2.7. A few schools ignore the modifiers entirely, and some do not award an A plus above 4.0. The local scale is the one that counts.
Does a failed or repeated course still count?
It depends on institutional policy. Some replace the original grade entirely, some average the attempts, and some keep both on the transcript while counting only one. This varies enough that assuming is unwise.
Is GPA rounded?
Usually reported to two decimal places, and generally not rounded up for thresholds — a 3.499 is not a 3.5 for an award requiring one. Where a cutoff matters, the exact policy is worth confirming rather than inferring.
How do international grades convert?
Not straightforwardly, and not by any universal formula. A UK first, a German 1.3 and a French 16 out of 20 all indicate excellence but map to a US GPA differently depending on who is doing the converting. Institutions and credential services publish their own tables, and those are what get used.
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