GPA Calculator

Every GPA calculation is the same two steps. First, convert each course's letter grade into grade points on your school's scale. Second, multiply those grade points by the course's credit hours to get quality points — the real currency of a GPA. Then add up the quality points, add up the credit hours, and divide one by the other.

GPA = total quality points divided by total credit hours, where a course's quality points = grade points times credit hours. Nothing else is involved. There is no step for how hard the course was, no adjustment for the professor, and no averaging of percentages.

Take a fifteen-credit term:

49.5 divided by 15 = 3.30. That is the semester GPA. Notice where the result lands: between the best and worst grade point on the list, pulled toward whichever grades carry the most credit. The C+ hurts more than the one-credit A helps, because it carries four times the weight.

One rule matters here and is easy to get wrong. A course with no letter grade yet is left out of both totals — it is not a zero. An in-progress course, an incomplete, and in most systems a pass/fail credit simply do not appear in the numerator or the denominator until a letter is attached to them.

• BIO 201 — 4 credits, B+ (3.3): 3.3 x 4 = 13.2 quality points
• ENG 105 — 3 credits, A- (3.7): 3.7 x 3 = 11.1 quality points
• MATH 220 — 4 credits, C+ (2.3): 2.3 x 4 = 9.2 quality points
• HIST 110 — 3 credits, A (4.0): 4.0 x 3 = 12.0 quality points
• PE 101 — 1 credit, A (4.0): 4.0 x 1 = 4.0 quality points
• Totals: 49.5 quality points across 15 credit hours

Here are the same five letter grades from above, rearranged so the C+ lands on the one-credit course and the second A lands on a four-credit one. Same letters, same fifteen credits, same scale.

3.30 becomes 3.64 without a single letter changing. A third of a point, produced entirely by which courses the grades were attached to.

The practical version: when you have a finite number of hours in a week and two things due, the four-credit course is worth four times as much to your GPA as the one-credit one. That is not an argument for neglecting the small course — it often has the least work per point available — it is just arithmetic worth knowing before you decide where the last two hours of a Sunday go.

Credit hours are also where most hand-calculated GPAs go wrong. Labs are sometimes bundled into the lecture and sometimes carry their own credit and their own separate grade. Language and studio courses often run 4 or 5 credits. Some courses are variable-credit and depend on what you actually registered for. Any calculator that assumes three credits per course is guessing, and the guess is wrong often enough to matter. Pull the real numbers off your registration record rather than from memory.

• BIO 201 — 4 credits, B+ (3.3): 13.2
• ENG 105 — 3 credits, A- (3.7): 11.1
• MATH 220 — 1 credit, C+ (2.3): 2.3
• HIST 110 — 3 credits, A (4.0): 12.0
• PE 101 — 4 credits, A (4.0): 16.0
• Totals: 54.6 quality points across 15 credit hours, which is a 3.64

A semester GPA covers the courses in one term. A cumulative GPA runs the identical calculation across every graded course you have completed. Same formula, different set of rows, which is why a good term never lifts your cumulative as far as it feels like it should. The denominator is carrying every credit you have ever taken.

You do not have to re-enter three years of courses to compute it. Your prior quality points are recoverable from two numbers already printed on your transcript: prior GPA times prior credit hours.

New cumulative GPA = (prior GPA x prior credits + this term's quality points) divided by (prior credits + this term's credits).

Say you have 45 credits at a 3.42 cumulative and you just finished the fifteen-credit term above at 3.30. Prior quality points: 3.42 x 45 = 153.9. This term added 49.5. That is 203.4 quality points over 60 credits, or a 3.39 cumulative. A term slightly below your average pulled the number down by three hundredths.

One honest caveat about that shortcut. The GPA on your transcript is already rounded, usually to two decimals, so reconstructing prior quality points from it introduces a small error — a few thousandths of a point in the final answer. That is fine for planning and not something to quote to a scholarship committee. Your registrar's figure is the official one.

Which credits land in the denominator is a school policy rather than a universal rule. Most systems separate credits earned from GPA credits (sometimes called quality hours or attempted hours). A failed course usually earns zero credit toward your degree while still occupying its credit hours in the GPA denominator, which is exactly why an F is so expensive. Transfer and pass/fail credits often run the other way: counted toward the degree, absent from the GPA.

The scale on this page — A+ and A at 4.0, A- at 3.7, B+ at 3.3, B at 3.0, B- at 2.7, on down through D- at 0.7 and F at 0 — is the most common American convention. It is not a standard. Grade point values are set institution by institution, printed in the academic catalog, and they vary in ways that change your number.

The tenths-versus-thirds difference sounds too small to bother with. Run the fifteen-credit example again with 3.67, 3.33 and 2.33 in place of 3.7, 3.3 and 2.3 and the GPA moves from 3.30 to 3.31. One hundredth. It stays that small right up until you are sitting on the line for Latin honors, a scholarship renewal or a program's stated 3.50 minimum, at which point a hundredth is the entire question. Look the scale up once, in your own catalog, and use it consistently everywhere.

• A+ at 4.0 versus 4.3. On this scale an A+ is worth exactly what an A is worth: 4.0, so it is recognition on the transcript rather than a GPA change. Some schools award 4.3 or 4.33 for an A+, which is how a GPA above 4.0 becomes possible without honors weighting. Others record the A+ but cap it at 4.0, and some never issue one.
• Tenths versus thirds. Many catalogs use 3.67, 3.33 and 2.67 where this page uses 3.7, 3.3 and 2.7. Same intent, slightly different arithmetic.
• No plus/minus at all. Some schools record only A, B, C, D and F, so every grade point is a whole number and there is no 3.7 available to earn.
• Missing rungs. Plenty of scales award an A- but no A+, or stop at D with no D-. A letter your school does not issue has no point value to look up.
• Percentage cutoffs are a separate policy. What percentage earns an A- is decided per course by your professor and printed in the syllabus. What an A- is worth in grade points is decided by the institution. Two different documents, and you need both.

Target questions are the same formula solved for a different unknown. You know where you are, you know where you want to be, and you want the number this term has to hit.

Required term GPA = (target cumulative x (prior credits + term credits), minus prior GPA x prior credits) divided by term credits.

Back to the student with 45 credits at a 3.42, now registered for 15 credits and aiming at a 3.60 cumulative. Total quality points needed: 3.60 x 60 = 216. Already banked: 153.9. The gap is 62.1 quality points across 15 credits, which works out to a 4.14 term GPA. On a 4.0 scale, that does not exist.

Better to know that in September than in December. The ceiling is quick to check first: (153.9 + 4.0 x 15) divided by 60 = 3.565. Straight A's in every course still leaves this student short of a 3.60 this term. Getting there takes two terms, and knowing that changes what you do with the first one.

Aim at 3.50 instead and the math is demanding but real: 3.50 x 60 = 210 total quality points, minus the 153.9 already banked, leaves 56.1 across 15 credits — a 3.74 term. Roughly an A- average with one B+ in it.

The general lesson is about the denominator. With 45 credits behind you, a perfect fifteen-credit term moves a 3.42 to 3.565. With 90 credits behind you, the identical perfect term moves it to 3.50. Early credits are cheap to move and late ones are not. That is the most useful thing to understand about cumulative GPA as a freshman and the least pleasant thing to learn as a senior.

Four situations break the clean arithmetic, and all four are governed by institutional policy rather than by math. No calculator can know your school's rules, this one included. Treat the list below as the questions to ask, not as the answers.

The practical approach: search your school's site for "grading policy" or "academic regulations" instead of asking a friend who is one year ahead of you. Until you have that in hand, leave these courses out of the calculation entirely and label the result an estimate. An estimate you know is an estimate is more useful than a precise-looking number built on a guessed policy.

• Pass/fail (P/NP, S/U, credit/no credit). The common pattern is that a P earns credit toward your degree and carries no grade points, so it sits outside the GPA on both sides of the division. The failing half varies more: some schools keep an NP out of the GPA as well, others convert it to an F worth zero that still occupies its credit hours. There are usually caps on how many pass/fail courses count toward a degree, and majors often refuse them for required courses.
• Withdrawals. A W typically appears on the transcript without grade points and stays out of the GPA. Two catches. It usually still counts as attempted credit for financial aid and satisfactory academic progress, which have their own completion thresholds. And most schools set a date after which a withdrawal becomes a WF or an F that does count as a zero. That date is the thing to look up.
• Repeats. This is the least standardized rule in the list. Some schools replace the original grade in the GPA while leaving it visible on the transcript. Some average both attempts. Some count only the most recent attempt, in either direction. Repeat forgiveness is frequently capped at a set number of credits and limited to courses below a certain original grade.
• Transfer credit. The usual pattern is that credits transfer and grade points do not, so the course counts toward degree requirements while your GPA at the new school starts clean. In-system transfers, dual enrollment and articulation agreements sometimes work differently, and some programs recompute a separate GPA that does include transfer work for admissions purposes.

Most incorrect GPAs come from a short list of errors, and every one of them takes about a minute to avoid.

• Averaging two GPAs. A fall at 3.20 over 12 credits and a spring at 3.60 over 18 does not make a 3.40. Convert both back to quality points, 38.4 plus 64.8, and divide by 30 credits for a 3.44. Averaging GPAs only works when the credit loads are identical.
• Feeding percentages into the formula. An 88% is not 3.52 grade points. Percentages become letters using the cutoffs in your syllabus, and only then do letters become grade points. Skipping the middle step invents precision the scale does not have.
• Counting an ungraded course as a zero. A course with no letter belongs in neither total. Leaving it in as a 0 is the fastest way to scare yourself with a number that is not real.
• Accepting default credit hours. Three is a reasonable guess and a bad input. Check the ones that are not three: labs, seminars, studios, language sequences, one-credit anything.
• Assuming a rounding rule. A 3.495 becomes a 3.50 only if your registrar rounds, and plenty truncate instead. If you are near a threshold that matters, ask rather than assume.
• Mixing scales inside one calculation. Use 3.7 for an A- or use 3.67, but not one in the fall and the other in the spring.
• Forgetting that an F keeps its credit hours. A failed 4-credit course earns nothing toward your degree and still puts four credits in the GPA denominator with zero quality points behind them. It is the single most damaging entry a transcript can carry, and the one a repeat policy is most worth reading about.

A GPA calculator answers a question you ask at the end of a term, once the letters already exist. The more useful question is the one you can only answer during the term: what is my grade in this course right now, and what does it need to be by December.

That is the part Semora handles. Scan a syllabus and each assignment, quiz, exam and reading comes off it with its own percentage weight, plus the letter-grade cutoffs your professor set, so a weighted course average is built from what your professor actually wrote rather than from your memory of it. If your syllabus groups work into categories instead (homework 20 percent, midterm 30, final 30), you set those up once on the course's grading screen, along with any dropped-lowest and extra-credit rules. Enter scores as work comes back and each course carries a live weighted grade reflecting only what has been graded so far. The Courses tab rolls those into a current semester GPA estimate using the same quality-points math as this page: each course's letter converted to grade points, multiplied by its credit hours, divided by the total credits. Courses with no graded work yet carry no letter, so they are left out of the average entirely rather than counted as zero, one graded assignment is enough to bring a course in. The screen shows how many courses and how many graded credits are behind the number.

Two details worth knowing, because they are the same two this page has been about. Credit hours default to 3 when a course does not specify one, so set the real figure on anything that is not a three-credit course. And the letter-to-points conversion uses the standard scale above (A+ and A at 4.0, A- at 3.7, on down to F at 0) until you change it.

Weighted course grades and the semester GPA estimate are both on the free tier, alongside 5 syllabus scans per calendar month and up to 4 courses. Free covers one semester total, so think of it as a term rather than a transcript.

Grade Scale & Forecasting is the Pro half, at $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year. It does the two things this page has argued matter. First, it makes both scales yours: an editable letter-to-grade-points table in Settings for the institutional side, and per-course percentage cutoffs for the professor's side, so a school that pays 4.33 for an A+ or a syllabus that puts the A- line at 93 percent is represented exactly instead of approximately. Second, it forecasts. A "What do I need?" panel on a course that uses per-item weights computes, from that course's real weights, the average you would need across the work still to be graded in order to land each letter — marking the ones already locked in, the ones only reachable with extra credit, and the ones out of reach. It appears once some weighted work has been graded. A final-exam what-if lets you pick an ungraded exam, try a score and see the projected course grade without saving anything.

One limitation, stated plainly: Semora calculates course grades and a semester GPA. It does not calculate a cumulative GPA, which needs final letters and credit hours from every term you have completed — data that lives with your registrar rather than in any syllabus. For that number, use the prior-GPA formula in the third section above. Semora runs on iPhone, iPad and the web on one account with near real-time sync, and Pro is purchased in the iOS app and applies account-wide, web included.