College GPA Calculator

How to use this college GPA calculator

The calculator asks for two numbers off your transcript, then one thing about each course that decides how it is treated.

1. Where you stand now. Your current GPA, meaning the cumulative figure on your transcript, and the credit hours behind it, both from your transcript or degree audit rather than memory, because the credit figure is the one people get wrong. Leave them blank to see this term on its own.
2. This term’s courses. The grade you earned or expect, and the credit hours the course carries.
3. Status. Whether the course counts normally, is a repeat of one you already took, is being taken pass/fail, or has ended in a withdrawal.

That last column is the whole point of this page. A college transcript is not always a clean list of graded courses, and registrars differ on how they treat the exceptions. Mark a course as a Repeat and the calculator asks which grade it replaces, then shows your projected GPA two ways, because schools split on whether the earlier attempt stays in the average. Mark one Pass / fail and its credits count toward your total while its grade stays out of the calculation. Mark one Withdrawn and it does nothing at all, which is what a withdrawal is for.

The formula, and why credits change the answer

A grade point average is a weighted average, and the weight is credit hours. Four steps:

1. Convert each letter grade to its grade point value on the 4.0 scale, so an A is 4.0, a B+ is 3.3, a C is 2.0.
2. Multiply each course’s grade points by its credit hours. The result is that course’s quality points.
3. Add up all the quality points, then add up all the credit hours that carried a letter grade.
4. Divide the quality points by the credit hours.

The values this calculator uses are the plus and minus scale the rest of this site runs on:

Worked through with the three graded courses this page opens on: a B+ worth 3.3 in a 4 credit course gives 13.2 quality points, a C+ worth 2.3 in a 4 credit course gives 9.2, and an A− worth 3.7 in a 3 credit course gives 11.1. That is 33.5 quality points across 11 graded credit hours, and 33.5 divided by 11 is a 3.05 term GPA.

The credit weighting is why two students with identical letter grades can finish a term apart. An A in a one credit seminar puts 4 quality points into the average. A C in a four credit lecture puts in 8. The seminar feels like the better grade and moves your GPA far less, and forgetting that is an easy way to end up disagreeing with the registrar.

When your school’s numbers are not these numbers

The table above is the scale this calculator runs on. Your registrar may publish something else, and the differences that change the answer are not always the obvious ones.

The point values. The University of Florida puts an A− at 3.67 rather than 3.7, a B+ at 3.33 rather than 3.3, and a D− at 0.67. On one course that is noise. Across a whole transcript it is not.

The letters themselves. UF awards no A+, and its failing grade is lettered E rather than F. A calculator that offers an A+, or that goes looking for an F, is describing a transcript UF does not issue.

What happens after the division. UF states that the GPA is displayed to the hundredths place and not rounded up, giving 3.248 as an example of a figure that stays 3.24. Rounding it to 3.25 puts it on the other side of any threshold set at 3.25.

UF also prints a figure on its advising calculator that it does not define there: deficit points. Its catalog defines them as the number of grade points below a C average on hours attempted at the university, which is the same arithmetic as the GPA read as a distance from 2.0 rather than as a ratio.

None of this makes UF unusual, only specific, which every institution is. Read your own catalog before trusting a number from any calculator, this one included. For the conversion step on its own, several published scales side by side sets out where registrars disagree.

Semester, cumulative and major GPA are three different numbers

Ask a college for your GPA and you may get any of three answers, and it is a distinction to get straight before you quote one on an application.

All three are produced the same way. What changes is which courses go into the totals.

Your semester GPA, sometimes called a term GPA, covers one term only. It decides dean’s list eligibility, and it moves the furthest, because a single term is a small sample.

Your cumulative GPA covers every graded course you have taken at that institution. It is the figure that academic standing, graduation requirements and scholarship conditions are measured against, and it is also called the institutional GPA for a reason: it covers work done at that school and nothing else.

Your major GPA covers only the courses counting toward your major. Departments set their own minimum for it, so a student can sit above the university threshold and still be short in the major.

Transfer credit is where the three come apart. Transferred credits count toward your degree without their grades entering the institutional GPA, which is why a transfer student’s degree audit and GPA can look like they belong to two different people. Enter the GPA and credit hours your current registrar reports, not a total spanning both schools.

What your college does not count: pass/fail, withdrawals and transfer credits

A GPA is not built from everything on your transcript. Three categories sit outside it, and each behaves differently.

Pass/fail courses earn credit but no grade points. Georgia Tech states the rule plainly for its satisfactory and unsatisfactory marks: those grades will not be included in the calculation of the grade point average and cannot be changed to a grade that will count in the average. It still earns institutional credit, so the hours count toward your total. That split matters, and it is why this calculator adds a pass/fail course’s credits to your total while keeping its grade out of the average entirely. It also cuts the other way: an unsatisfactory mark does not damage your GPA, but it earns you nothing.

A withdrawal earns neither: a W carries no credit and no grade points, so it leaves the average untouched. That is the trade: your GPA is protected, and you are no further through your degree. An incomplete behaves differently again. Where it sits outside the GPA until it resolves, the replacement grade then counts normally, which makes it a deferral rather than an exemption.

Transfer credit usually stays out of the institutional GPA altogether. The credits count toward graduation while the grades do not follow them across.

One consequence trips people up at the wrong moment. Because pass/fail credits carry no grade, they can fail to count toward thresholds defined in graded hours. The University of Maryland, whose dean’s list requires twelve credits at a 3.5 semester GPA, specifies that courses with grades of P and S are excluded from the twelve credit determination. Take enough of your term pass/fail and you can hold the GPA and still miss the list.

Repeating a course, and what grade forgiveness actually does

This is where a college GPA parts company with a simple average, and it is the calculation with the largest effect on a struggling GPA.

When you retake a course, your school does one of two things. Under grade forgiveness, also called grade replacement or course forgiveness, the earlier attempt stops counting toward your GPA and only the new grade is averaged in. Without it, both attempts stay in the average and the retake pulls upward far more slowly.

The difference is not small. On the figures this page opens with, a student sitting at 3.10 over 42 credits who retakes a course and turns a D into a C+ finishes at 3.26 if the earlier grade is dropped, and 3.09 if it is not. Same student, same term, same work. That is why the calculator reports both rather than picking one for you.

Where schools differ is in the conditions. San Diego State University publishes a policy specific enough to show the shape of the thing: forgiveness applies only where the original grade was C− or lower; undergraduates may repeat up to 28 units, of which a maximum of 16 may receive forgiveness; a course may be repeated only one time for forgiveness; and the original grade stays visible on the transcript even though only the most recent one is averaged. It is also unavailable where the first grade followed a finding of academic dishonesty.

Four things to look up in your own catalog: which grades qualify, how many courses or units you may forgive, whether it is automatic or has to be requested, and whether both attempts stay on the transcript. That last one matters, because graduate and professional programs may recalculate a GPA from the full transcript rather than accepting the institutional figure, and a forgiven grade that is still printed can be counted again.

Where your GPA puts you: probation, good standing and the dean’s list

A GPA on its own is just a number. What gives it weight are the thresholds your institution attaches to it, and the calculator names the band your projected figure falls into.

At the bottom is academic probation. The University of Nebraska Omaha places a student on probation when the cumulative GPA is below 2.0 after six or more semester hours have been attempted. Maryland uses the same 2.0 cumulative line. But a flat threshold is not the only model: Millikin University runs a sliding scale, placing a student on probation below 1.5 after the first semester, 1.75 after the second and 2.0 from the third semester onward, which gives a first-year student more room and then closes it. Below probation the consequences escalate rather than repeat: Nebraska Omaha moves a student to academic suspension when a semester GPA under 2.0 is paired with a cumulative under 1.75 for those with 13 to 45 hours attempted, or under 2.0 from 46 hours onward, and Maryland provides for dismissal where a student with 60 or more credits stays below 2.0 for two consecutive semesters.

At the top is the dean’s list. Nebraska Omaha, Maryland and Millikin all set the same bar: a 3.5 semester GPA across twelve credit hours, which is the full-time threshold at each of them. At Nebraska Omaha, part-time students are judged over consecutive fall or spring terms instead. That agreement is real but it is not a rule, and the tiers above it already diverge. Nebraska Omaha reserves a separate Chancellor’s List for a 4.0; Millikin calls its equivalent the High Dean’s List, also at a perfect 4.00. Further up again are the Latin honors printed on the degree itself, cum laude and its higher grades, which are awarded on the final cumulative GPA rather than on any single term. Those cutoffs vary more than the dean’s list does, and some institutions set them by class rank instead of a fixed number, so that one has to come from your own catalog.

Between the two is good academic standing: above the probation line, carrying enough credits, and with no ceremony attached to it.

Take these as real examples rather than as the standard. The thresholds are institutional, the tiers carry different names, and your catalog is the authority.

What it takes to move a cumulative GPA

The uncomfortable arithmetic of a cumulative GPA is that it gets harder to move the further through a degree you are, because each new term is a smaller share of a larger total.

A student with a 2.4 cumulative GPA over 30 credit hours who takes 15 credits at a straight 3.5 finishes at 2.77. The same student at the same 2.4 but 90 credits in, taking the same 15 credits at the same 3.5, finishes at 2.56. Identical effort, less than half the movement, entirely because of what is already banked.

Two things follow. The credit hours behind your current GPA decide how long it will take to clear a threshold, so it is worth working that out early rather than assuming one strong term will do it. And a retake under a forgiveness policy can move a cumulative GPA further than a new course at the same grade, because it removes a low figure rather than diluting it. Try both in the calculator above before deciding which is worth your term.

Where to go next

This page projects a GPA across courses and terms. Two neighbors handle the jobs on either side of it.

If you want your running grade inside a single class rather than across your transcript, that is a course grade rather than a GPA, and our college grade tool tracks assignments and weights within one course.

If what you want is the arithmetic of a grade point average in general, including weighted and unweighted figures and how honors and AP courses are treated, that lives on the GPA calculator linked at the top of this page. If the transcript in question is a high school one rather than a college one, the high school version of this calculator applies the 4.0 scale and the honors and AP bumps instead.

This page works within one institution. If your record covers more than one, adding several schools into one cumulative GPA handles the transfer case, including the quarter-to-semester conversion that a mixed record needs.

This page is built for a college transcript. Several years earlier the same idea is much simpler, and working out a GPA from a middle school report card covers the version with no credit hours in it.