High School GPA Calculator
Put in the courses from your report card and this works out your unweighted and weighted grade point average together, on the 4.0 scale your own high school uses. For college credits or a term-by-term projection, the general GPA calculator covers those instead.
Enter one row per course. The unweighted and weighted figures are worked out together, because they are rarely the same number and your school may report either.
Optional. Fill both in from your transcript to roll these courses into a running GPA; leave them blank to work out this term on its own.
What each course contributes
Runs in your browser. Nothing is sent or stored. The point values here follow two published district policies, but grade scales, honors weighting and which courses count are all set locally, so check your own handbook or transcript before anything important depends on the answer.
Free to use, no sign-up, and every calculation happens in your browser.
How to use this high school GPA calculator
Every row is one course, and the calculator wants four things about it.
- The grade. A letter off your report card, or switch the second menu to percentages and type the number instead.
- The credits. Use the value on your transcript. At DCPS every course is worth either 1 credit for a full year or 0.5 for a semester. If your school does not use credits at all, tick the box and every course is treated equally.
- The level. Regular, Honors or AP / IB / DE. The last covers Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and dual enrollment, and this is the control that separates your two GPAs.
- Whether it is an NCAA core course. Only needed if you tick the box to show that third figure.
Both figures are worked out at once. If you want to roll this term into your running average, put your current GPA and the credits behind it into the two boxes underneath, straight off your transcript rather than from memory. The credits figure is the one people get wrong.
The formula your high school actually uses
A grade point average is built the same way in both districts below, and by every calculator that gets the answer right. Four steps:
- Turn each letter grade into its grade point value.
- Add the weight for honors or AP if the course earns one.
- Multiply by the credits the course carries. That product is the course’s quality points.
- Add up all the quality points and divide by the total credits.
Written out, that is total quality points divided by total credits attempted. The word attempted is doing real work there. District of Columbia Public Schools draws the distinction explicitly: attempted credit is every course you received a grade in, a failing grade included, while earned credit is only the courses you passed with a D or higher. A failed course gives you no credit toward graduation but stays in the bottom of the GPA fraction, which is why one F moves the number so much. A Pass works the other way around. DCPS records it as credit earned with no grade points at all, so a pass-marked course counts toward graduation and drops out of the GPA entirely rather than counting as a zero.
Letter grades and grade points, unweighted and weighted
This is the scale the calculator uses by default. It is the published scale of District of Columbia Public Schools, effective for the 2023-24 school year and after, reproduced as they publish it.
| Grade | Percent | Unweighted | Honors / Pre-AP | AP / IB / DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 93 to 100 | 4.0 | 4.5 | 5.0 |
| A- | 90 to 92 | 3.7 | 4.2 | 4.7 |
| B+ | 87 to 89 | 3.3 | 3.8 | 4.3 |
| B | 83 to 86 | 3.0 | 3.5 | 4.0 |
| B- | 80 to 82 | 2.7 | 3.2 | 3.7 |
| C+ | 77 to 79 | 2.3 | 2.8 | 3.3 |
| C | 73 to 76 | 2.0 | 2.5 | 3.0 |
| C- | 70 to 72 | 1.7 | 2.2 | 2.7 |
| D+ | 67 to 69 | 1.3 | 1.8 | 2.3 |
| D | 64 to 66 | 1.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 |
| F | 63 and below | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Two details in that table are easy to read past. The honors column is the unweighted column plus 0.5 and the AP column is the unweighted column plus 1.0, all the way down until the last row, where all three collapse to zero. The plus and minus marks follow a rule of their own: a plus adds 0.3 to the base letter and a minus takes 0.3 away, which is where 3.7 for an A- and 3.3 for a B+ come from. And there is no A+ row and no D- row, because DCPS does not publish either. Some schools do award an A+, and a few of those score it 4.3 rather than 4.0, which is how a student with no failing grade ends up above 4.0 on an unweighted scale. If your handbook lists an A+, use the A row here and add 0.3 if your school scores an A+ at 4.3.
A worked example, both ways
Four courses, one term. These are the courses the calculator starts with, so you can check the arithmetic against the tool above.
| Course | Level | Grade | Credits | Unweighted points | Weighted points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English 11 | Regular | A- | 1.0 | 3.7 | 3.7 |
| AP Biology | AP | B | 1.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 |
| Honors Algebra 2 | Honors | A | 1.0 | 4.0 | 4.5 |
| Physical Education | Regular | B+ | 0.5 | 1.65 | 1.65 |
| Totals | 3.5 | 12.35 | 13.85 | ||
Divide each total by the 3.5 credits and you get an unweighted GPA of 3.53 and a weighted GPA of 3.96. Same four grades, same term, a gap of 0.43 that comes entirely from two course labels.
Notice what the half-credit course does. Physical Education earned a B+, which is worth 3.3 grade points, but at half a credit it contributes 1.65 quality points and half a credit to the denominator. A course with fewer credits moves your GPA less, in either direction. That is the whole reason the multiplication step exists.
Weighted and unweighted: which one does your school report?
Weighted and unweighted GPA answer different questions. The unweighted figure answers how well you did. The weighted figure answers how well you did against the rigor of the courses you chose. A transcript that shows only one of them is telling an incomplete story, and a school that weights at all has both numbers available.
The practical differences matter before you compare your number to anyone else’s:
- An unweighted GPA has a ceiling of 4.0. A weighted one does not. On the DCPS scale above, a student taking nothing but AP courses and earning straight As lands at 5.0.
- Weighted GPAs are not comparable between schools. A 4.3 from a district that adds 1.0 for AP means something different from a 4.3 from a district that adds 0.5, and neither is directly comparable to a school that does not weight at all. The same caution applies to class rank, which a school may compute from either figure.
- Which courses qualify is a local decision. The Texas Education Agency, in a rule it has proposed rather than adopted, would give Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and non-CTE dual credit courses weights equal to one another while leaving the honors weight to be determined locally by each district. Even a state trying to standardize the calculation leaves that piece alone.
So the honest answer to what your GPA is depends on whose scale you use, and the only scale that matters for your transcript is your own school’s.
What a failing grade does to a weighted course
Look at the bottom row of the scale table again. F is 0.0 in the unweighted column, 0.0 in the honors column, and 0.0 in the AP column.
The weight is not added to a failing grade. An A in an AP course is worth 5.0, but an F in that same AP course is worth zero, exactly like an F in gym. You do not get a point of credit for having attempted something difficult and not passed it.
This is not one district being strict. Onslow County Schools in North Carolina publishes a completely different scale from DCPS, a 10-point grading scale with no plus or minus grades at all, and it sets F to zero in its standard, honors and AP columns too. Two districts, two scales, same rule at the bottom.
The calculator applies it. Set any course to F and watch the weighted figure drop to meet the unweighted one, rather than keeping a bonus it has not earned. The course also keeps its credits in the denominator, because you attempted it, which is the part that does the real damage.
When your school does not use credits
Not every school weights the average by credits. If yours does not, tick My school does not use credits and the credits column disappears, with each course counted once.
The calculator did not invent this shortcut. DCPS runs both methods side by side and says so plainly: its Term Grade Average does not weight courses for credit amounts, adding the marks and dividing by the number of courses, while the cumulative GPA on the transcript does weight by credit. The first is used for the honor roll and athletic eligibility; the second is the one colleges see.
The two methods give different answers. On the four courses above, weighting by credit gives 3.53 unweighted. Counting each course once gives 3.50, because Physical Education stops being a half-weight course and starts pulling its full share. The gap is small here and will not always be.
Two real district policies, side by side
It is tempting to assume there is one national grading scale. There is not. Here are two real districts, both publishing their grading policy openly, and almost nothing about them matches.
| DC Public Schools | Onslow County, NC | |
|---|---|---|
| Plus and minus grades | Yes, eleven marks from A to F | No, five letters only |
| An A is | 93 to 100 | 90 to 100 |
| Lowest passing percent | 64 for a D | 60 for a D |
| Honors adds | 0.5 | 0.5 |
| AP / IB adds | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| An F in an AP course | 0.0 | 0.0 |
A student scoring 91 percent gets an A- worth 3.7 at DCPS and a flat A worth 4.0 at Onslow County. A student scoring 62 percent fails at DCPS and passes with a D at Onslow County. Same work, different transcripts.
Where the two agree is on the weighting, and they are not alone in it. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction sets the AP figure at state level: the state course weighting system awards the equivalent of one quality point to the grade earned in an AP, IB or CIE course. It says nothing about honors, which is left to individual districts.
One more difference worth knowing about, because it will make your arithmetic disagree with your transcript by a hundredth: DCPS truncates rather than rounds. Its own published example works out to 2.6167 and is printed as 2.61, not 2.62. This calculator rounds, matching the rest of this site. If your school truncates, drop the last digit rather than rounding it up.
The GPA the NCAA calculates is not the one on your transcript
Outside bodies do not always take the GPA your school prints. Some recalculate it on their own rules, and if you are hoping to play a sport in college the clearest example is the NCAA.
The NCAA Eligibility Center computes its own core-course GPA, and it states plainly that this figure only includes NCAA-approved core courses and may differ from your transcript GPA. Core courses are the academic ones: English, math at Algebra I or higher, science, social science, world language and a few others. Your electives, your PE credit and your studio art are simply not in the calculation.
The thresholds are fixed and public. Division I requires a minimum 2.3 core-course GPA. Division II requires 2.2. Division III schools set their own standards on campus.
Tick Show NCAA core-course GPA above and a checkbox appears on every row. Mark the courses your school has registered as NCAA-approved and the third figure appears, measured against both minimums. In the worked example, the transcript-style unweighted GPA is 3.53, but with Physical Education excluded the core-course figure is 3.57. Dropping a non-core course moved the number, which is exactly the point.
Two cautions. The NCAA also notes that if you repeat a core course it may use your highest grade, which is not how DCPS treats a retake on the transcript. And the Eligibility Center applies its own conventions to the grade scale itself, so treat this figure as an estimate and confirm anything that matters with your counselor and the Eligibility Center directly.
Where to go next
This page works on finished course grades. If you are chasing the grade inside a single class, that is a different calculation and it has its own tool.
- Working out a class grade in high school takes your tests, homework and quizzes and their category weights, and tells you where you stand in that one course before it becomes a letter.
- Converting a percentage or letter into grade points covers the conversion step on its own, with the full chart across several scales.
- Projecting a college GPA picks up where this page stops, with credit hours, repeats, pass/fail courses and withdrawals.
- Rolling finished terms into a cumulative GPA takes each term or school as a single row of transcript totals, and converts quarter hours to semester hours first.
- The middle school version, before credits and weighting takes a report card on the plain 4.0 scale, with credit weighting available but switched off.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate grade point average for high school?
Convert each letter grade to its grade point value, add the honors or AP weight if the course earns one, multiply by the course’s credits to get its quality points, then divide the total quality points by the total credits you attempted. A one-credit course graded B on a standard 4.0 scale contributes 3.0 quality points; the same B in an AP course on the DCPS scale contributes 4.0.
Is 97% a 4.0 GPA, and is 70% a 2.0?
On the DCPS scale above, yes: 93 percent and up is an A, worth 4.0 unweighted. On the Onslow County scale it is also an A, because there an A starts at 90. But a 97 in an AP course is worth 5.0 on both scales, so the honest answer is that a single percentage does not map to a single GPA number until you know the scale and the course level. The same question at the other end shows how much the scale matters. Is 70 percent a 2.0? At Onslow County it is a flat C, worth exactly 2.0. At DCPS the same 70 lands in the C- band and is worth 1.7. Converting a percentage into grade points is its own step, and it has its own page.
Is a 2.7 GPA bad in high school?
A 2.7 unweighted is roughly a B- average, and whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you want it to do. It clears the NCAA Division I core-course minimum of 2.3 and the Division II minimum of 2.2, assuming your core courses carry it. Individual colleges publish their own admissions ranges, so check the ones you are actually applying to rather than an average.
Can you have a GPA higher than 4.0?
On a weighted scale, yes. Because honors courses add 0.5 and AP courses add 1.0 before the average is taken, a student in a heavy AP schedule can finish above 4.0. The DCPS weighting makes it a 5.0 scale in practice: every course AP and every grade an A comes to exactly 5.0. An unweighted GPA cannot exceed 4.0 unless your school scores an A+ above 4.0, which some do.
Do 9th grade grades count toward your GPA?
On a cumulative high school GPA, ninth grade counts along with every other year unless your district says otherwise. What may not count is high-school-level coursework taken in middle school: DCPS excludes it from the cumulative GPA deliberately, so that students are not discouraged from taking harder classes early. A semester GPA covers one grading period; a cumulative GPA rolls every term together, and it is the cumulative figure that reaches colleges.
Do electives, PE and art count toward your GPA?
If the course awards credit and a letter grade, it goes into your GPA like any other course, weighted by its credits. That is why the half-credit PE class in the example above still moves the number. Where those courses drop out is the NCAA core-course GPA, which counts approved academic subjects only.
What happens to my GPA if I retake a class I failed?
It depends on your district, and the two policies give very different answers. DCPS keeps both: when a student retakes a course they previously failed, the original F and the new grade are both included in the GPA calculation and both stay on the transcript. Other districts operate grade replacement, where the new grade takes the place of the old one. The NCAA, separately, may use your highest grade when a core course is repeated. Check your handbook before assuming a retake erases anything.
Does the NCAA use the GPA on my transcript?
No. The Eligibility Center calculates a core-course GPA from NCAA-approved core courses only, and says directly that it may differ from your transcript GPA. Division I requires at least 2.3 and Division II at least 2.2. Tick the NCAA box in the calculator to see that figure alongside your other two.