Cumulative GPA Calculator

How to use this cumulative GPA calculator

Each row is a whole term or a whole school, not a course. You need two numbers for each one, and both are already printed on your transcript.

1. GPA hours. The credit hours from classes that carried a letter grade. This is not the same as the hours you earned toward a degree, because a failed course still occupies GPA hours.
2. The GPA. The figure for that term or that school, as the transcript states it.
3. The calendar. Semester or quarter. If any row is on a quarter system the calculator converts it before adding anything up.

The last control decides whether your totals are reported in semester hours or quarter hours. Switching it moves the hours figure and leaves the GPA where it was. That is deliberate. Converting hours changes how much weight one term carries against another, and the finished average does not depend on which unit you read it in.

The formula, and the two numbers your transcript already prints

A cumulative GPA is total quality points divided by total GPA hours. That is the whole calculation.

Quality points, also called grade points, are what a course is worth once the grade and the credit hours are multiplied together: a B, worth 3.0, in a 4-hour course is 12 quality points. Add the quality points from every graded course, divide by the hours those courses carried, and the result is your cumulative GPA.

You rarely have to do any of that yourself. The University of Oregon registrar tells students to fill in the quality points and GPA hours from your most recent official or unofficial transcript, and gives the formula as Quality Points / GPA Hours = Cumulative GPA. Both figures are already computed and printed for you at the bottom of each term.

GPA hours trip people up, because they are not the hours you earned. Earned hours count what you passed and can put toward a degree. GPA hours count what carried a letter grade, and a failed course carried one. So an F keeps pulling on your average long after it has stopped counting toward graduation. It added nothing to the top of the fraction and it is still sitting in the bottom.

That is also why this calculator asks for terms rather than courses. Re-entering four years of individual grades to arrive at a number your transcript has already worked out is effort spent reproducing an answer you were given.

Quarter credits and semester credits are not the same size

A quarter is shorter than a semester, so a quarter credit represents less classroom time than a semester credit. Add the two together untouched and the quarter school gets more influence over your average than it earned.

The ratio is two to three, and two universities publish it from opposite ends.

Cal Poly states it as a multiplier: quarter units transferred in are converted by multiplying by 0.667, so a 4-unit quarter class becomes 2.667 units. The University of Washington registrar states the same ratio in reverse, converting semester credits to quarter credits by multiplying by 1.5.

The ratio turns up inside admissions rules too. The University of Washington Graduate School will accept a 3.0 over the last 90 graded quarter credits or the last 60 graded semester credits, and 90 quarter credits against 60 semester credits is that same ratio, written into a policy.

There is one thing the arithmetic cannot tell you. Converting hours shows you what a combined average looks like, but not what a receiving school will accept. That school applies its own transfer rules first, and those rules decide which of your courses arrive at all.

A worked example: two schools, two calendars

These are the rows the calculator starts with, so you can check the arithmetic against the tool above.

The quality points come from the converted hours, not the printed ones. The community college row is 60 semester hours at 3.80, which is 228 quality points. The university row is 30 hours at 3.00, which is 90. Together that is 318 quality points over 90 semester hours, and a cumulative GPA of 3.53.

Two shortcuts produce two different wrong answers here.

• Average the two GPAs and you get 3.40. That treats a 90-hour record and a 30-hour record as equal, which they are not.
• Weight by hours but skip the conversion and you get 3.60. That counts 90 quarter hours as though they were 90 semester hours, handing the community college half again as much influence as it earned.

The gap between 3.40 and 3.60 is a fifth of a grade point, on the same two transcripts, and it comes entirely from how the two numbers are combined.

The same arithmetic runs backwards if you need it to. To find the GPA a coming term has to earn to move your cumulative to a target, multiply the target by your total hours including that term, subtract the quality points you already hold, and divide by the hours the new term carries. Take 60 hours at 3.20, which is 192 quality points, and a 15-hour term ahead. A 3.40 cumulative needs 3.40 x 75 = 255 quality points, so the new term must supply 63 across 15 hours, which is a 4.20 term average. That is above a 4.0 scale, which is the useful part of the answer: the target is out of reach in one term, and knowing that now is better than finding out in May.

The GPA that combines schools, and who asks for it

Your university calculates a GPA from the courses you took at that university. Where transferred work arrives as credit without grades, it fills your degree requirements without touching your institutional GPA. Which of your transferred courses are treated that way is your own registrar’s decision, so read the transfer credit evaluation on your transcript before assuming either answer.

A second figure does combine everything, and some institutions calculate it deliberately. Western Washington University publishes an All-Institution GPA calculator and explains who wants it: many departments here at Western consider this GPA when making departmental admissions decisions, as do scholarship granting organizations, and graduate schools.

So a transfer student can be carrying two true numbers at once. The transcript GPA covers one school. The all-institution figure covers the whole record, and it is the one a graduate program is likely to recalculate for itself when it reads your file.

Western Washington attaches a caveat to its own calculator: individual departments and scholarship bodies apply their own calculation guidelines, and students in doubt should ask the department. Take that seriously. A combined figure is a good estimate of what someone else will compute. Only the department can tell you whether it counts the same things you did.

Is your cumulative GPA good enough? The 3.0 line

A cumulative GPA means nothing on its own. It gets its meaning from a threshold someone else has published, and the two graduate schools below both set theirs at 3.0.

The two rows do different jobs. Washington’s rule is about getting in, and it offers a second route: a strong recent record can stand in for a weaker overall one, which is what the last-90-credits clause is for. Arizona’s rule is about staying in, and it has teeth, because falling below the line for two consecutive semesters ends the program.

Both also show that the line is administrative rather than absolute. Washington lets programs petition for applicants who miss it. So a cumulative GPA below 3.0 closes the default route while leaving the petition open.

If the number you are checking belongs to an undergraduate transcript rather than a graduate one, the thresholds that apply to you are your own institution’s, and those are set locally. Learn the 3.0 line early anyway. Years later it is the figure a graduate program will judge your undergraduate record by. The last-90-credits clause also means the second half of a degree can end up carrying more weight than the first.

For an undergraduate the cumulative GPA carries a published line of its own: graduation honors. Two institutions set that line in very different ways. Cal Poly publishes fixed numbers: summa cum laude at 3.850, magna cum laude at 3.700 and cum laude at 3.500. Only courses taken at Cal Poly count toward the Cal Poly GPA those honors are read from. UT Dallas publishes no fixed number at all. Its thresholds are recalculated every year from a rolling average of the previous six long semesters, separately for each school. The top five percent of graduates take summa cum laude, the next ten percent magna and the next fifteen percent cum laude. The floor is 3.40, and it takes 45 graded hours at UT Dallas to qualify at all.

So the same 3.6 is comfortably cum laude at one institution and, at the other, depends on what everyone else in your school did. It is the 3.0 point again in a different setting: the number is fixed, the rule it is measured against is not.

Where to go next

This page combines figures you already have. The steps on either side of it live elsewhere on the site.

• Projecting a term you have not finished takes individual courses and credit hours, and handles repeats, pass/fail and withdrawals the way a college registrar does.
• How a letter or a percentage becomes a grade point covers the conversion step on its own, with the chart across several scales.
• The main GPA calculator, linked at the top of this page, works a single term out from scratch, with weighted and unweighted figures side by side.
• A middle school report card on the 4.0 scale is the simplest version of this calculation, with every class counting the same unless the school assigns credits.

Frequently asked questions