The arithmetic, in full
Each letter grade maps to a number of grade points. Multiply that by the credit hours of the course to get quality points, add the quality points across every course, and divide by the total credits attempted. Nothing else is involved.
| Course | Grade | Points | Credits | Quality points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chemistry | A | 4.0 | 3 | 12.0 |
| Calculus | B+ | 3.3 | 4 | 13.2 |
| Literature | B- | 2.7 | 3 | 8.1 |
| Total | 10 | 33.3 | ||
33.3 divided by 10 is 3.33. Note what the credit weighting did: the B+ is the middle grade of the three but contributes the most quality points, because it is the four-credit course. A student wanting to move that average has more leverage in the heavy courses than in the light ones, and that is not a trick of the calculator, it is the definition.
| Grade | Points | Grade | Points | Grade | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A+ | 4.0 | B+ | 3.3 | C+ | 2.3 |
| A | 4.0 | B | 3.0 | C | 2.0 |
| A- | 3.7 | B- | 2.7 | C- | 1.7 |
| D+ | 1.3 | D | 1.0 | D- | 0.7 |
| F | 0.0 | ||||
Weighted GPA is a local convention, not a standard
The weighted mode adds points for harder courses — half a point for honours and a full point for AP, IB or dual enrolment, which are the most common values and the defaults here. An A in an AP course then yields 5.0 instead of 4.0, which is why weighted averages above 4.0 exist at all.
The scheme is set district by district and sometimes school by school. Some districts weight honours at 0.5 and AP at 1.0 as above. Some weight both at 1.0. Some weight on a 6.0 scale. Some weight only the core academic subjects and leave electives unweighted, some cap the number of weighted courses that can count, and some do not weight at all. Two students with identical transcripts at different schools can be handed weighted GPAs a full point apart. The bump fields on this page are adjustable for exactly that reason: put in what your school actually does, and if you do not know, the number to trust is the unweighted one.
What colleges do with the number you send them
Most selective colleges recalculate. They take the transcript, strip out physical education, health and other non-academic courses, convert the school's grades to their own scale, frequently discard the school's weighting entirely and apply their own, and produce an internal GPA that neither the student nor the school ever sees. This is a direct consequence of the previous section — an admissions office comparing thirty thousand applicants from thousands of schools cannot treat incompatible weighted numbers as comparable, so it normalises them.
The practical consequence is that the weighted GPA is mainly useful inside your own school, for class rank and for local scholarship thresholds. Course rigour still counts heavily in admissions, but it counts through the transcript itself — which courses were taken, and how they compare to what the school offered — rather than through the weighted number that summarises them.
Retakes, pass/fail and the edges
Repeated courses are handled differently everywhere. Some institutions replace the original grade, some average the two attempts, and some keep both on the transcript while counting only the higher one toward the GPA. If yours replaces, enter only the new grade. If it averages, enter both lines. Pass/fail courses marked P here add to credits earned but are excluded from the average, which is the near-universal treatment, and a withdrawal usually leaves credits and average alike untouched. Because these rules genuinely vary, the registrar's published policy governs, and the number on the official transcript is the one that counts — this page reproduces the arithmetic, not your institution's regulations.
Questions people ask
What is a good GPA?
It depends entirely on what it is being compared against, which is why no single figure answers this. In US high schools an unweighted 3.0 is around the middle of college-bound students, 3.5 opens most state universities, and highly selective institutions see applicant pools clustered near 3.9 unweighted. At the university level the thresholds that carry actual consequences are more concrete: 2.0 is the usual line for academic good standing, 3.0 is a frequent floor for graduate applications and many scholarships, and 3.5 or above is where Latin honours typically begin. Ask what decision the number is feeding into, then find that threshold.
Why does my weighted GPA here not match my transcript?
Almost certainly the bump values or which courses receive them. Set the honours and AP fields to whatever your district actually uses, then check that you have not marked a course as weighted that your school treats as regular — electives, physical education and some introductory courses are commonly excluded from weighting even when the class is labelled honours. Some districts also cap the number of weighted courses per year or apply the bump only to the core four subjects. If it still disagrees, the school policy document is the authority and this page is not.
How much can one term move my cumulative GPA?
Less than most people expect, and the effect shrinks as credits accumulate. A student with 90 credits at 3.20 who takes 15 credits at 4.00 ends up at 3.31 — a perfect term moved the cumulative figure by about a tenth. The same perfect term after only 30 credits at 3.20 gives 3.47. Fill in the previous GPA and its credit count on this page and it will show you the exact movement. The general shape is that early grades are far more leveraged than late ones, in both directions.
Does a plus or minus really change much?
Three tenths of a grade point per step, applied over the credits of that course. On a 3-credit course the difference between B and B+ is 0.9 quality points, which across a 15-credit term shifts the term GPA by 0.06. That is small in isolation and meaningful in aggregate: four such steps in a year is roughly a quarter of a point. It also matters that some institutions do not use plus and minus at all, and a few cap the top at A rather than A+ — where A+ is worth 4.3, as some universities allow, it becomes the only way a term average can exceed 4.0 without weighting.