GPA calculator
Letter grades and credit hours in, GPA out. Add your existing GPA to see the new cumulative number.
What your GPA can and cannot be moved by
The most useful thing this calculator teaches is not your GPA, it is how heavy the denominator has become. Every credit hour you complete makes the next semester matter a little less. A first-year student with 15 credits can swing their cumulative number dramatically in one term. A senior with 100 credits mostly cannot. Try it above: enter a prior GPA of 3.20 with 90 prior credits, then fill a 15-credit semester with straight A grades. The cumulative rises only to about 3.31. That is not a reason for despair, it is a planning fact. If you need a specific cumulative GPA for a scholarship or program, run the math early, while your credits are light enough for grades to move it.
Credits are the hidden multiplier students forget. An A in a 1-credit lab contributes 4 quality points. A B in a 4-credit course contributes 12 and drags four credit hours of weight into the average. When triaging a brutal week, protect the grade in your highest-credit course first; the transcript math is not sentimental about which class you liked more.
A semester, computed by hand
Take the default table: an A in a 3-credit course, a B+ in a 3-credit course, and a B in a 4-credit course. Quality points are 4.0 x 3 = 12, plus 3.3 x 3 = 9.9, plus 3.0 x 4 = 12, for 33.9 points across 10 credits. Semester GPA: 33.9 / 10 = 3.39. Now add a prior GPA of 3.20 over 45 credits. The cumulative becomes (3.20 x 45 + 33.9) / (45 + 10) = 177.9 / 55 = 3.23. Notice the good semester lifted the cumulative by only three hundredths of a point; that is the denominator at work.
The grade scale and the combining rule
Each letter maps to the standard 4.0-scale points: A is 4.0, A- is 3.7, and each step down (B+, B, B-, and so on) drops by 0.3 or 0.4 until F at 0.0. The calculator multiplies each course's points by its credits, sums the results, and divides by total credits. Courses with zero or blank credits are simply ignored, which is the correct treatment for pass/fail classes. The cumulative figure reconstructs your prior quality points as prior GPA times prior credits, adds this semester's points, and divides by the combined credits. That is the same weighting a registrar uses, so the result should match your transcript to the rounding digit. Displayed values are rounded to three decimals internally and shown to two.
Where your school may differ
This tool uses the most common US scale, and schools deviate from it in known ways. Some award 4.3 for an A+, some skip minus grades entirely, and weighted high school scales run to 5.0 for honors and AP courses; none of those variants are modeled here. Grade replacement policies, where a retaken course overwrites the original F instead of averaging with it, are also outside what this calculator can know, and they can change a cumulative GPA far more than any single new semester. When the stakes are real, transfer applications or scholarship cutoffs, confirm the scale on your registrar's site and treat this number as the standard-scale estimate it is.
Frequently asked questions
How is GPA calculated?
Each letter grade maps to points (A = 4.0, A- = 3.7, B+ = 3.3, and so on). Multiply each course's points by its credit hours, add them up, and divide by total credit hours.
Do A+ grades count as more than 4.0?
At most US schools A+ is capped at 4.0, which is what this calculator uses. A few institutions award 4.3; check your school's registrar page if it matters for you.
How do I calculate cumulative GPA with past semesters?
Enter your prior GPA and total prior credit hours in the bottom row. The calculator weights old and new quality points by credits, which is exactly how registrars combine them.
Do pass/fail courses affect GPA?
Usually not: a Pass earns credits but no quality points, so it is excluded from the GPA average. Leave pass/fail courses out of the table.