GPA Calculator — 4.0 Scale, Unlimited Courses

A GPA is a weighted average, and the weights are credits

Enter grades and credits per course, pick your scale, and you get a semester figure and a cumulative one alongside your total credits.

The phrase "weighted average" appears in every handbook and slides past most readers. It is the whole mechanism: each course influences the result in proportion to its credits, not equally.

What that means when you are planning

A four-credit course moves your average four times as much as a one-credit course for the same grade. So where you concentrate effort is not neutral, and many students assume it is — that every good grade lifts the number by the same amount.

It does not, and knowing that is ordinary planning information rather than a way to game anything. If revision time is finite and two exams fall in the same week, the credits tell you which one your transcript will notice.

It also cuts the other way, which is the less obvious half: a poor grade in a large course is harder to recover from than a poor grade in a small one, because you would need a great deal of credit at a higher grade to move the weighted average back.

Scales do not travel between institutions

The tool supports the common maximums, and the important point is that a number on one scale is not comparable to a number on another. The letter-to-point mappings differ, the maximums differ, and the rules about what counts differ.

So a figure cannot be converted to another institution's scale by proportion. Use the formula the receiving institution publishes, if it publishes one — and where it does, that formula takes priority over any general rule, including any you find online. If it does not publish one, ask, because a number submitted on the wrong basis is worse than no number.

What the calculation does not know

It computes exactly what you enter, and it has no knowledge of your institution's rules. Four things worth confirming against your own handbook rather than assuming:

• Pass or fail courses — some are excluded from the average entirely, some count
• Transferred credits — often counted toward the degree but not toward the average
• Repeated courses — some institutions replace the earlier attempt, others average both
• Term versus cumulative — which one a form is asking for is not always stated

Those rules genuinely differ between institutions and sometimes between programmes at the same one, so a figure that disagrees with your official transcript usually means a policy difference rather than an arithmetic error.

How students actually use it

Checking a transcript figure against the arithmetic before submitting it. Working out where a term stands before all the results are in. And modelling a planned set of grades to see what is genuinely at stake in an exam — which is more useful than worrying, because the credits often reveal the outcome is less sensitive to one paper than it feels.

Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded, which matters here: grades are personal data, and there is no reason for them to leave your device for an average.

If a form wants a percentage rather than a grade point average, institution-specific formulas are in the CGPA to percentage converter.