GPA calculator

"What is your GPA?" has three defensible answers, and a college application will ask you for a different one depending on who is reading it. This page works out all three from the same list of courses: your unweighted GPA on the 4.0 scale, your weighted GPA with extra credit for honors and AP or IB courses, and the UC capped-weighted GPA the University of California calculates for itself.

Nothing you enter leaves this page or is saved anywhere. All calculations run in your browser; no data is sent to a server while you use it, and nothing is written to storage or to a cookie, so closing the tab deliberately discards your entries. Loading the page is counted as a page view, as on every other page of this site; the information you enter is not part of that count and is never transmitted to us.

The three numbers, and who asks for which

Unweighted ignores course level entirely: an A is 4.0 whether it came from AP Physics or from a study hall. It never exceeds 4.0, and it is the only one of the three that means the same thing at two different high schools, which is why most applications ask for it first.

Weighted adds half a grade point per semester for an honors course and a full point for AP or IB, which is why a weighted GPA above 4.0 is ordinary. It is a convention rather than a standard — your school may weight honors a full point, may weight only AP, or may not weight at all — so treat the weighted figure here as an estimate and your transcript as the authority.

UC capped-weighted is the most difficult to calculate by hand, and the one that determines University of California eligibility. UC ignores your school's GPA and recalculates from your A–G courses taken in tenth and eleventh grade, under three rules that surprise people:

• An A+ is 4.0. There is no 4.3 in this system, so the pluses at the top of your transcript earn nothing extra. This page applies that everywhere rather than only to the UC number, so the unweighted figure matches the transcript it came from.
• Honor points stop at eight semesters. One point per semester of honors, AP or IB — and a student with sixteen such semesters gets exactly the same bonus as one with eight. This is the rule that makes a UC GPA come out below the weighted GPA a school prints, and quoting the wrong one to a UC reader is the most common version of this mistake.
• A D or an F earns no honor point, however advanced the course. The bonus is for passing the harder class, not for taking it.

Two things this page does not try to decide for you: whether a course is A–G certified, and whether it falls in the right grade levels. Both are a lookup against your own school's UC course list, which changes yearly — so enter the courses UC would count, and the calculator will apply the cap. If you are not sure which those are, that is a good question for a counselor, and it is one our college consulting team answers regularly.

The grade-point table

Every calculation on this page starts here. Note the first two rows: an A+ and an A are both 4.0, for the reason given above.

The honors and AP/IB columns are the weighted values. UC does it differently: it uses the plain grade points and then adds one honor point per eligible semester, capped at eight — which is why the third worked example below comes out lower than the weighted figure rather than higher.

Three worked examples

Each one is a full year — six courses, two semesters each unless stated — with every step written out. These are the same three schedules the calculator's tests are built on, so the numbers here and the numbers it prints are the same arithmetic.

1. A schedule with no honors or AP courses

With nothing to weight, all three methods have to agree — and a calculator that showed three different numbers here would be wrong in the most visible possible way.

• Total grade points 34.6 over 10 semesters.
• Unweighted 3.46 — 34.6 ÷ 10.
• Weighted 3.46 — no honors or AP course, so nothing is added.
• UC capped-weighted 3.46 — no eligible semesters, so no honor points.

2. Five AP courses, where the UC cap bites

Ten AP semesters against a cap of eight. This is the example worth reading twice: the UC number lands below the weighted GPA the school would print, so a student quoting the weighted one to a UC reader is quoting a number that reader will not use.

• Total grade points 44.0 over 12 semesters.
• Unweighted 3.67 — 44.0 ÷ 12.
• Weighted 4.50 — a full point on each of the 10 AP semesters: (44.0 + 10.0) ÷ 12.
• UC capped-weighted 4.33 — 10 eligible semesters, capped at 8: (44.0 + 8) ÷ 12. The two AP semesters over the cap are worth nothing.

3. A D in an AP course, which the two methods treat differently

A short schedule, to isolate the C-or-better rule. The weighted number rewards the D in AP and the UC number does not.

• Total grade points 12.0 over 6 semesters.
• Unweighted 2.00 — 12.0 ÷ 6.
• Weighted 2.50 — +1.0 on each AP semester and +0.5 on each honors semester, regardless of grade: (12.0 + 2.0 + 1.0) ÷ 6.
• UC capped-weighted 2.33 — the C in Honors Precalculus clears the floor and earns 2 honor points; the D in AP Chemistry earns none: (12.0 + 2) ÷ 6.

Raising the number, rather than recalculating it

A GPA moves slowly, and it moves most in the semesters you have left rather than the ones behind you — which is why the useful question is usually which courses to take next year, not what the average already is. Elite has been answering that question since 1987.