GPA Calculator

Credit hours are the weights, and that is the whole difference

A GPA is not the average of your grades. It is the average of your grades weighted by how many credit hours each course carries, and the two answers are not close. Rice University's registrar gives the operation in one line: multiply each grade's point value by that course's credits, then “add up these products (the total quality points) and divide this sum by the total number of credits taken.” Indiana University says the same thing in its own vocabulary: “THIS SEMESTER G.P.A. is calculated by dividing the CREDIT POINTS by the GPA HOURS.”

Here is why that matters more than any other sentence on this page. Take exactly two courses, an A and a C, and move the credits around.

The same two letter grades, three different numbers

A spread of 1.200 on an identical pair of letters. The arithmetic for the first row: 4.0 points times 4 credits is 16 quality points, 2.0 points times 1 credit is 2, so 18 quality points over 5 credit hours is 3.600. The second row is 4 plus 8 over the same 5 hours, so 2.400. The unweighted mean sits between them and describes neither transcript.

The practical consequence is that your 1-credit courses are nearly free in both directions. A one-credit seminar you do badly in costs you very little; a one-credit seminar you ace rescues very little. Your four-credit science sequence with its lab is where the number is actually decided.

Checked against a registrar's own worked example

Rather than assert that the arithmetic above is right, here it is run against a published example. Duke's registrar prints a sample undergraduate term and its answer. Entered into the calculator at the top of this page it comes out to the same figure.

Duke's published example, Trinity and Pratt undergraduate

15.5 quality points over 4.5 credits is 3.4444, which Duke reports as 3.444. Set the scale above to the Duke undergraduate one, A- 3.70 with D- 1.00 and the GPA truncated, enter those five rows exactly as printed, and the calculator returns 3.444. Nothing has to be substituted by hand: A+ is in the grade list, and the truncation Duke applies is the one that scale applies.

Duke's graduate example is a second check at a more normal credit load: A- and B+ and B at three credits each, an A at one credit and a B- at three, giving 42.1 quality points over 13.0 hours. That is 3.2384, which this page shows as 3.238.

The 4.0 scale is not one scale

This is the part that almost every GPA page gets wrong by omission. “The 4.0 scale” is not a standard. Each institution publishes its own table of grade point values, and the tables genuinely disagree, in at least four separate ways: the decimal used for plus and minus grades, whether A+ exists and what it is worth, which plus and minus grades exist at all, and even the letter used for failure.

Five tables, all read from the institutions' own registrar pages:

Read from each registrar's published grade-value page on 1 October 2026. “None” means that grade does not appear in that institution's table.

Four things in that table are worth saying out loud.

Tenths or thirds: a 0.03 difference per plus or minus grade

Indiana and Duke use 3.7 and 3.3. Illinois, Rice and Arizona State use 3.67 and 3.33. Take five three-credit courses, all A-, and the two conventions give you different numbers:

Three hundredths. That sounds like nothing until it meets a hard cutoff written as 3.70, which is a common threshold for honours standing and for scholarship renewal. The same transcript clears it at one institution and misses it at another, and the calculator on this page will tell the second student they cleared it.

A+ is worth more than an A at one of these schools

The grade list follows whichever scale you select, so it changes when you change the scale: the Arizona State scale drops C-, D+ and D- and fails with E rather than F, because that is what its published table does, and the no-plus-or-minus scale offers five letters. Where A+ is worth 4.0, which is what Indiana, Illinois, Rice and Duke all publish, an A+ and an A give the same answer. Arizona State is the exception: its table puts A+ at 4.33, and it says so explicitly while also capping the result, “Although the plus/minus scale includes a grade of A+ with a value of 4.33, the cumulative GPA is capped at 4.00.” Both halves of that are in the calculator. Straight A+ grades on that scale come out at 4.000, not 4.330, because of the cap; where A+ grades actually pay is a mixed transcript, and a 3-credit A+ beside a 3-credit B reads 3.665 rather than 3.500.

Some of these grades do not exist where you study

Arizona State's undergraduate table has no C-, no D+ and no D-. The University of Arizona's undergraduate table has no plus or minus grades at all: “Undergraduate, graduate, pharmacy, and medicine programs use regular grades (A, B, C, D, E) that are included in the calculation of the grade point average”, with the values “A = 4, B=3, C=2, D=1, E=0” and plus/minus reserved for the J.D. programme. If you study at Arizona, the B+ row in this dropdown is a grade your registrar cannot issue, and choosing it will quietly inflate your estimate by 0.3 per affected credit.

Duke pays the same for a D- as for a D

Duke's undergraduate table reads D+ 1.3, D 1.0, D- 1.0. A D- is worth a full point there, where this page gives it 0.7. Twelve credits of B plus one three-credit D- is 2.540 on this page and 2.600 under Duke's table. It is also the clearest demonstration that these tables are decisions rather than mathematics.

And the variation is not even one table per university. Duke publishes four: the Trinity and Pratt undergraduate table above; a graduate table running A+ to C- with no D grades at all, so a D is simply not a grade the Graduate School awards; a School of Nursing table with no A+, no C- and no D; and the Fuqua School of Business, which does not use letters, grading SP 4.0, HP 3.5, P 3.0, LP 2.5, F 0.0. A single GPA calculator cannot be correct for all four, and this one is built for the first.

Which courses go under the line

The denominator is “GPA hours”, and it is not the same as the hours you enrolled in. Three rules show up repeatedly in registrar policy, and together they explain most of the gap between a calculator and a transcript.

Pass/fail credit usually enters neither side. Indiana: “Only courses with grades of A+ through D- and F are used in calculating a Grade Point Average (GPA). P and S grades are passing grades in completed courses, but are not used in calculation of a GPA.” The University of Arizona: “Classes taken for Pass/Fail, or classes transferred from another college or university are not factored into the GPA.” Duke goes further and covers the failing case too: “When a course is taken on the Credit/No Credit, Pass/Fail, or Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading basis, no grade, including the failing grade, is used in the GPA calculation.” So a pass/fail course should be left out of the list above entirely. There is no letter you can enter for it that produces the right answer, because the right answer is for it to be absent.

A failing grade stays in the denominator. This is what makes an F expensive rather than merely unhelpful. Arizona State's worked example is three courses at three credits each, graded A, B- and E. The honor points are 12.00, 8.01 and 0.00, and the division is “20.01 ÷ 9.0 = 2.22 GPA”. The failed course added nothing above the line and three full credits below it. If you enter F for a course on this page, that is exactly what happens here too.

Transfer credit normally does not count toward the GPA at the receiving school, even though the credit hours do count toward your degree. Arizona says so in the sentence quoted above. That is why a transfer student's GPA can look nothing like the average of everything they have ever taken.

Term GPA, cumulative GPA, and why one bad term moves less than you fear

Two numbers, same formula, different scope. A term GPA runs over the courses in one term. A cumulative GPA runs over every graded course in that career: Duke describes it as “a summary of all Duke courses taken over a student's career”, and Indiana lists separate undergraduate, graduate and cumulative figures, each “calculated by dividing total ... Credit Points by total ... GPA hours”.

The mistake almost everyone makes is to average the two GPAs. Do not. Quality points add and credit hours add; GPAs do not. Here is the difference with real numbers, for a student who has done 60 credits at a 3.500 and then has a genuinely bad 15-credit term at a 2.00.

A 1.5-point term dragged the cumulative down by 0.300, not by 0.750. That is the reassuring half. The unforgiving half is the climb back, because the same arithmetic that protected you now works against you. From 240 quality points over 75 credits, getting the cumulative to 3.500 requires:

The 30-credit row is impossible on a 4.0 scale, and the 45-credit row requires a perfect A in every remaining course for three semesters. That asymmetry is the real lesson: a cumulative GPA is slow to damage and slower to repair, and the repair gets cheaper only as the denominator grows. You can see this directly in the calculator above by entering a whole transcript rather than one term, with each completed term as a single row whose credits are that term's GPA hours and whose grade is its nearest letter. That approximation is rough precisely because it has to snap your term average onto the nearest letter, which is why the honest way to do it is quality points on paper.

Repeating a course: three published policies that disagree

This page has no repeat field, and no page can guess your school's rule, because the published rules are not variations on a theme. They are different policies with different outcomes for the same two attempts.

The last grade stands, even if it is worse. The University of Memphis: “When you repeat a course, the second attempt and all subsequent attempts are used in calculating your GPA. The first attempt still appears on your transcript, but it is not used in calculating GPA.” Memphis then spells out the trap in its own example: “if you earn a D in ENGL 1010 on your first attempt, but an F on your second attempt, the F replaces the D in GPA calculation even though the D is a higher grade.” Under that policy a retake is a genuine risk, not a free option.

The better grade replaces, once per course, up to a unit cap. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo: “Undergraduate students may repeat a maximum of 16 units at Cal Poly for purposes of improving GPA”, and “If the second grade is equal to or higher than the first, then the grade earned by repeating the course will replace the quality points, quality hours, and earned hours which were previously earned. The original grade is 'forgiven' from the GPA computation, but both grades appear on the student's permanent record (transcript).” There are two further limits worth copying down: “any course is eligible for grade forgiveness one time only”, and “If more than 16 units are repeated, the two grades will be averaged.”

Both grades count. This is the default where no forgiveness policy exists, and it is also what Cal Poly falls back to past its cap.

Three outcomes from one C followed by one A: the C vanishes from the GPA, the C is averaged with the A, or the A simply replaces it. Nothing on this page can tell you which applies to you, and the difference is larger than any rounding question.

What a credit hour is, and why the three-hours rule is a floor

The credits you type into this page are the weights, so it is worth knowing what one is. The federal definition lives in 34 CFR 600.2, and it is more carefully hedged than the version that circulates on study-advice sites. Verbatim, a credit hour is

“an amount of student work defined by an institution, as approved by the institution's accrediting agency or State approval agency, that is consistent with commonly accepted practice in postsecondary education and that—(1) Reasonably approximates not less than— (i) One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different period of time”.

Two things in that sentence get misreported constantly. First, “three hours of work per credit hour per week” is not a rule your school follows; it is a regulatory floor on “an amount of student work defined by an institution”, and the regulation says “reasonably approximates not less than”. The same section explicitly “Permits an institution ... to take into account a variety of delivery methods, measurements of student work, academic calendars, disciplines, and degree levels.” The number is the institution's, and the floor is the government's.

Second, a quarter credit hour is defined over “ten to twelve weeks” where a semester credit hour is defined over “approximately fifteen weeks”. A 15-credit quarter is not the same quantity of work as a 15-credit semester, and a GPA computed across a transfer between the two systems has had its weights converted by someone. Ask who, and how, before comparing the two figures.

What this page does not know

Your registrar's grade-point table. It uses one of several published conventions. If yours uses 3.67 rather than 3.70 for an A-, every plus and minus grade you enter is off by 0.03 per credit, always in the generous direction.

Which scale is selected. The page cannot know your school, only what you pick. Every scale here was read off a registrar's own page, but choosing the wrong one moves every plus and minus grade you enter. The values in use are printed under the dropdown for exactly that reason.

Rounding versus truncation. Four of the scales here round the third decimal; the Duke undergraduate one truncates it, because Duke states “All GPAs are truncated to three decimal points.” Those differ: a true 3.4996 is 3.499 truncated and 3.500 rounded. If you are reading this page to see whether you have cleared a cutoff written to two or three decimals, that one digit is the whole question, so pick the rule your school uses, and the transcript still wins.

Repeated courses, pass/fail credit and transfer credit. No fields for any of them. Leave pass/fail and transfer courses out, and treat a repeat according to your own school's policy before you type anything.

Honours weighting. No bonus points, no scale above 4.0. If you need a high-school weighted GPA, this is not it.

Anything built on top of a GPA. Academic standing, probation thresholds, Latin honours, major-specific GPAs computed over a subset of your courses, financial-aid satisfactory-progress rules. All of those are institutional and several of them are computed over a different set of courses than your cumulative GPA.

How to find your own school's rule in about two minutes

Search your institution's site for “grade point values”, “grading system” or “explanation of grades”, restricted to the registrar's pages. Every page cited at the bottom of this article was found that way. Then copy down three things, because those three decide whether a calculator can be right for you:

1. The point value of every letter your school issues, including whether A+ exists and whether C-, D+ and D- exist. Then pick the scale above whose printed values match, and check them against your registrar's table rather than trusting the label.
2. Which grades are excluded from the GPA, and separately, which are excluded from GPA hours. Pass, satisfactory, withdrawal, incomplete and transfer entries are the usual list.
3. The repeat policy, including any unit cap and whether forgiveness is limited to one attempt per course.

If your scale uses the 3.67 convention, select it above and the calculator uses it. If your school's table matches none of the five, the arithmetic is short enough to do by hand: the point value times the credits for each course, added up, divided by total credits. That is the whole formula, and it is the same one Rice, Duke, Indiana and Arizona State all print.

A percentage in one course is a different object

A GPA starts from letters. A course average starts from percentages, and the two cannot be converted into each other without two institution-specific tables: your instructor's percentage-to-letter cutoffs, and your registrar's letter-to-point table. Neither is universal, and the first one is often not even published at the university level. That is why this page begins at the letter grade and the course average calculator stops at the percentage. If you are trying to work out what your grade in one class will be, start there and come back here once the term is graded.

Sources

• Indiana University, Grading System and grade values: the A+ 4.0 / A- 3.7 / B+ 3.3 / D- 0.7 table behind this page's default scale, the rule that only A+ through D- and F enter the GPA, that P and S grades do not, and the credit-points-divided-by-GPA-hours formula.
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Explanation of Grades: the alternative convention, A+ 4.00, A- 3.67, B+ 3.33, C- 1.67, D- 0.67.
• Rice University, GPA Calculation: the same 3.67 convention, and the formula stated as adding the products and dividing by total credits taken.
• Arizona State University, Grades and grading policies: A+ at 4.33 with the cumulative GPA capped at 4.00, an undergraduate table with no C-, D+ or D-, E rather than F as the failing grade, and the worked example dividing 20.01 honor points by 9.0 net hours for a 2.22 GPA.
• University of Arizona, Grades and Grade Point Average (GPA) Calculation: undergraduate grades A, B, C, D, E with values 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 and no plus or minus, and that pass/fail and transferred classes are not factored into the GPA.
• Duke University, Grade Point Average (GPA): the undergraduate table including D- at 1.0, three further tables for the Graduate School, Nursing and Fuqua, the two worked examples checked above, the exclusion of Credit/No Credit and Pass/Fail grades, and that all GPAs are truncated to three decimal points.
• University of Memphis, Repeated Courses: GPA Scenarios: the last grade stands even when it is lower, with the registrar's own D-then-F example.
• Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Repeating a Course: the 16-unit cap, replacement only when the second grade is equal or higher, forgiveness once per course, and averaging beyond the cap.
• Atlantic Cape Community College, Grading: a published chain from percentage to letter to grade point, on the 3.7 / 3.3 convention, and three different scales inside one catalogue.
• 34 CFR 600.2, definition of credit hour: the regulatory floor on student work per credit hour, that the amount is defined by the institution, and the fifteen-week semester versus ten-to-twelve-week quarter distinction.

Every figure on this page was read against the sources above on 1 October 2026. Nothing you type leaves your browser. More: the rest of the MyCampusKit tools.