Grades
Weighted, unweighted and cumulative GPA
Three different numbers, all called "your GPA", all calculated differently.
A GPA is a weighted average. Almost every misunderstanding about it comes from not being told what it is weighted by — and there are two separate weightings, applied at different stages, which is why the same transcript can honestly produce three different numbers.
Step one: letters become numbers
Each letter grade maps to a grade point on the 4.0 scale:
| 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 |
Two things about this table trip people up.
A+ is usually 4.0, not 4.3. Most US institutions cap the unweighted scale at 4.0, so an A+ and an A are worth the same. A minority award 4.3. If your school is one of them, your calculated GPA will come out slightly higher than a standard calculator gives you.
Not every school uses plus and minus grades at all. Where they do not, a B is simply 3.0 and there is no B+ or B− to worry about. This alone can shift a GPA by a tenth of a point in either direction between two schools awarding identical work.
Step two: courses are weighted by credit
This is the weighting people forget. A GPA is not the average of your grade points. It is the average weighted by how many credits each course carries.
The arithmetic runs through quality points:
quality points = grade points × credit hours
GPA = total quality points ÷ total credit hours
Worked through with four courses:
| Course | Grade | Points | Credits | Quality points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biology | A | 4.0 | 4 | 16.0 |
| History | B+ | 3.3 | 3 | 9.9 |
| Maths | B− | 2.7 | 4 | 10.8 |
| Art | A− | 3.7 | 1 | 3.7 |
| Total | 12 | 40.4 |
GPA = 40.4 ÷ 12 = 3.37.
Note what happened to the Art grade. It was the second-highest grade on the transcript, but at one credit it contributed 3.7 quality points out of 40.4 — under a tenth of the total. The straight average of the four grade points is 3.425; the credit-weighted figure is 3.37. A high grade in a small course moves your GPA very little, and a poor grade in a four-credit course moves it a lot. That is worth knowing before you decide where to spend revision time.
Step three: weighted GPA adds a difficulty bonus
An unweighted GPA stops at step two and caps at 4.0.
A weighted GPA adds points for harder courses before the credit weighting is applied. The usual scheme:
- Regular course: no bonus
- Honours: +0.5
- AP or IB: +1.0
So an A in an AP course is worth 5.0 rather than 4.0, and a weighted GPA can exceed 4.0 — which is why you see reported GPAs of 4.3 or 4.5.
These bonus figures are the most common convention, not a standard. Some schools give +1.0 for honours. Some cap the weighted scale at 5.0, others do not cap it. Some apply the bonus only if you passed. Your school's published policy overrides every calculator on the internet, including ours.
Because the schemes differ, a weighted GPA is not comparable between schools. This is well understood by admissions offices, which is exactly why most of them recalculate an unweighted GPA from your transcript themselves rather than trusting the number your school printed. If you are comparing yourself against published averages, make sure you are comparing the same kind of number.
Cumulative GPA
Your cumulative GPA is the same calculation run across every term at once — not the average of your term GPAs.
That distinction matters whenever your terms have different credit loads. Take two terms:
| Term | Quality points | Credits | Term GPA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autumn | 40.4 | 12 | 3.37 |
| Spring | 60.0 | 18 | 3.33 |
| Cumulative | 100.4 | 30 | 3.35 |
Averaging the two term GPAs gives 3.35 here too — but only because the numbers are close. Take a 4.0 across 3 credits in one term and a 3.0 across 15 in the next: the average of the term GPAs is 3.50, while the true cumulative GPA is 3.17. The heavier term dominates, as it should.
The practical consequence: a bad term hurts more if it was a heavy term, and it gets harder to move your cumulative GPA as you accumulate credits. By your final year, a single course is a small fraction of a large denominator. Early terms are the ones with leverage.
Grades that are not grades
Most transcripts carry entries that are deliberately excluded from the calculation:
- Pass/Fail courses earn credit but no grade points, so they affect neither the numerator nor the denominator.
- Withdrawals (W) normally carry no penalty and are excluded entirely.
- Incompletes (I) are excluded until they resolve into a real grade.
- Transfer credits usually count towards your degree but not towards your GPA at the receiving institution — a genuinely common surprise.
A calculator that silently drops these rows without telling you is hiding something you need to see. Ours lists what it excluded and why, because “my GPA came out wrong” is almost always a row that quietly vanished.
Repeated courses
If you retake a course, whether the first attempt still counts depends entirely on your institution’s replacement policy. Three common variants:
- Replacement — only the newer grade counts. Best case.
- Averaging — both attempts count as separate courses.
- Both stand, degree credit once — both affect your GPA; only one counts towards graduation requirements.
There is no way to infer which applies from your transcript alone. Ask.
Working it out for yourself
If you want to check a figure by hand, the whole thing is four steps: convert each grade to points, multiply by credits, add up both columns, divide. Everything else — weighting, cumulative totals, exclusions — is a variation on that.
Our GPA calculator does all of it and shows the quality points per course, so you can see which courses are actually moving the number rather than just getting a figure. If what you need instead is the score required on a specific final exam, the final grade calculator works backwards from your target.