GPA Calculator
Enter your letter grades and credit hours to calculate your semester GPA on the standard 4.0 scale, and optionally combine it with a prior GPA for a cumulative total.
Term GPA
3.49
Across 4 courses totaling 13 credit hours, the GPA for this term is 3.49.
Courses Counted
4
Total Credit Hours
13
Total Grade Points
45.3
Grade Point Scale
A+
4.3
A
4.0
A-
3.7
B+
3.3
B
3.0
B-
2.7
C+
2.3
C
2.0
C-
1.7
D+
1.3
D
1.0
D-
0.7
F
0.0
What is GPA?
Grade Point Average (GPA) is a commonly used indicator of academic achievement — the average of the grades earned in each course, weighted by that course's credit hours. A harder, higher-credit course affects your GPA more than a lighter, lower-credit one, which is why GPA isn't a simple average of letter grades but a credit-weighted one.
Grading systems vary between schools and countries, but the scale below — 4.0 for an A down to 0 for an F, with plus/minus increments — is the most widely used standard in the US and is what this calculator is built around.
How Is GPA Calculated?
Each letter grade converts to a numeric grade point (A = 4.0, B = 3.0, and so on, with plus/minus grades adjusting by 0.3). GPA is the total grade points earned, divided by total credit hours attempted — not a simple average of the letter grades themselves.
For example: Math (4 credits, A+) contributes 4 × 4.3 = 17.2 grade points. History (3 credits, B) contributes 3 × 3.0 = 9.0. English (2 credits, A-) contributes 2 × 3.7 = 7.4. Total grade points: 33.6 across 9 total credits — a GPA of 33.6 / 9 = 3.73. Grades like P (Pass), NP (Not Pass), I (Incomplete), and W (Withdrawal) are excluded entirely from the calculation, since they don't carry a standard grade point value.
Why Credit Hours Matter More Than Grade Count
A single A in a 4-credit course affects your GPA about twice as much as an A in a 2-credit course, because credit hours act as a weight in the calculation, not just a label. This is why two students with the same set of letter grades can end up with different GPAs if their credit hours differ — and why a student struggling in a high-credit course should prioritize it over a low-credit elective when triaging study time, purely from a GPA-protection standpoint.
Term GPA vs. Cumulative GPA
Your term (or semester) GPA reflects only the courses from that specific term. Your cumulative GPA reflects every course you've ever taken, and is what transcripts and graduation requirements are usually based on. To combine a new term with your prior academic history, this calculator multiplies your entered prior GPA by your prior total credit hours to recover your prior total grade points, adds this term's grade points on top, and divides by the combined credit hours.
One consequence of this weighting: the more credit hours you've already accumulated, the harder it becomes to move your cumulative GPA significantly with any single term — a strong or weak semester matters much more to a first-year student's cumulative GPA than to a graduating senior's.
Example — Your Current Inputs
Across 4 courses totaling 13 credit hours, the GPA for this term is 3.49.
Additional Example — Recovering From a Rough Semester
A student enters their sophomore year with a 3.5 cumulative GPA across 45 credit hours. A difficult semester — 15 credit hours averaging a 2.0 GPA — drags their cumulative GPA down to about 3.25. To fully recover to 3.5 by the end of the following semester (15 more credit hours), they'd need to average roughly a 4.0 that term — every single class an A.
This illustrates why GPA recovery gets harder, not easier, the more credit hours you've already accumulated: a bad semester has a large one-time impact, but climbing back out requires sustained above-average performance over multiple future terms, not just one great one.
About These Parameters
- Grade & Credit Hours (per course)
- Select the letter grade earned in each course and its credit hours (also called credit units or semester hours). Leave the grade blank for any row you're not using — blank rows are ignored automatically.
- Prior Cumulative GPA & Prior Credits
- Optional — fill both in together to see a combined cumulative GPA alongside this term's GPA. Leave both blank to see only this term's GPA on its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn't my GPA a simple average of my letter grades?
Because credit hours weight each grade's contribution. An A in a 1-credit seminar and an A in a 4-credit core course both count as "4.0," but the 4-credit course contributes four times as many grade points to your total — a simple unweighted average of letter grades would ignore this entirely and misrepresent your actual academic workload.
Does a Pass/Fail or Withdrawal grade affect my GPA?
Under the standard scale used here, no — P (Pass), NP (Not Pass), I (Incomplete), and W (Withdrawal) are excluded from the GPA calculation entirely, since they don't correspond to a standard grade point value. They may still count toward credit requirements for graduation even though they don't affect GPA — check your specific school's policy, since this can vary.
Does every school use the same 4.0 grading scale?
No — grading systems vary between schools and countries. Some schools don't use plus/minus grades at all (a straight A/B/C/D/F scale), some use E instead of F, and weighted high school GPAs often exceed 4.0 to account for honors or AP courses. This calculator uses the standard unweighted 4.0-plus/minus scale used by most US colleges and universities.
How much will one bad grade actually hurt my GPA?
It depends heavily on that course's credit hours relative to your total accumulated credit hours. A single low grade in a 3-credit course has a much larger effect on a freshman with 15 total credits than on a senior with 100+ total credits — the same bad grade gets diluted across a larger base of prior good grades as you accumulate more credit hours over time.