Grade Point Average (GPA) Calculator

How This Calculator Works

GPA (Grade Point Average) is a credit-weighted average of your letter grades converted to a numeric scale — the standard way US high schools and colleges measure overall academic performance. Add a row for each course — its letter grade, how many credit hours it’s worth, and (if it’s Honors, AP, IB, or a college-level class) its weighting — and this calculator computes your GPA the same way virtually every US high school and college calculates it. A 4-credit class affects your GPA more than a 1-credit class, since more of your total coursework is riding on that grade.

If you already know your cumulative GPA and credit hours from before this term, enter them under “Include a previous cumulative GPA” — the result then folds those in, giving your true cumulative GPA across every term rather than just this term’s courses in isolation.

Switch the Calculation Type to “What GPA Do I Need?” to work the same math backward: enter your current GPA and credit hours, the cumulative GPA you’re aiming for, and how many more credit hours you have left before that target is evaluated, and this calculator solves for the flat average GPA those remaining credit hours need to earn.

The Formula

Target GPA (solved backward):

$$\text{needed average} = \frac{\vC{\text{Target GPA}} \times (\vA{\text{Current Hours}} + \vB{\text{Future Hours}}) - (\vD{\text{Current GPA}} \times \vA{\text{Current Hours}})}{\vB{\text{Future Hours}}}$$

The same credit-weighted-average formula below, just rearranged to solve for the one unknown (the future average) instead of the overall GPA.

Each letter grade converts to “quality points” on the standard 4.0 scale (A = 4.0, A- = 3.7, B+ = 3.3, and so on down to F = 0.0). Your GPA is:

$$\text{GPA} = \frac{\sum (\vE{\text{Grade Points}} \times \vF{\text{Credit Hours}})}{\sum \vF{\text{Credit Hours}}}$$

In other words: multiply each course’s grade points by its credit hours, add those all up, then divide by the total number of credit hours.

Worked Example

Three courses: an A in a 3-credit class, a B+ in a 4-credit class, and an A- in another 3-credit class:

1. Quality points: $(\vE{4.0} \times \vF{3}) + (\vE{3.3} \times \vF{4}) + (\vE{3.7} \times \vF{3}) = 12.0 + 13.2 + 11.1 = \vG{36.3}$.
2. Total credit hours: $\vF{3} + \vF{4} + \vF{3} = \vH{10}$.
3. GPA: $\vG{36.3} \div \vH{10} = 3.63$.

Weighted GPA adds bonus points to a course’s grade before averaging — this calculator uses the common convention of +1.0 for AP/IB/college-level courses and +0.5 for Honors courses (capped so a single course can’t exceed 5.0 quality points), which is what most US high schools that weight GPA use. Individual schools’ exact weighting policies vary, so if you need your exact official GPA, confirm your school’s specific scale.

Note that some schools use a slightly different unweighted scale too (some cap A+ above 4.0, or don’t use +/- modifiers at all) — check your specific institution’s scale if you need an exact official GPA rather than a standard estimate.

Target GPA — a student with a 3.0 GPA over 60 credit hours, aiming for a 3.2 cumulative GPA after 30 more credit hours:

$$\text{needed average} = \frac{\vC{3.2} \times (\vA{60} + \vB{30}) - (\vD{3.0} \times \vA{60})}{\vB{30}} = \frac{288 - 180}{30} = 3.6$$

They’ll need to average a 3.6 across their next 30 credit hours — noticeably higher than their current 3.0, since 30 credit hours isn’t quite enough to pull a 90-credit-hour average up that far on its own.