How to Calculate Your GPA (College and High School)
To calculate your GPA, convert each course's letter grade to grade points on the 4.0 scale (A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, D = 1.0, F = 0.0), multiply each by the course's credit hours, add those results, and divide by the total credit hours. GPA is a credit-weighted average, so grades in higher-credit courses count more.
What Is a GPA?
GPA stands for grade point average. It condenses all of your course grades into a single number, usually on a 0.0–4.0 scale in the United States. Because it is a weighted average, a GPA reflects both how well you did and how heavy each course was in credit hours.
Colleges, scholarship committees and employers use GPA as a quick summary of academic performance, which is why understanding exactly how it is built — rather than guessing — is worth a few minutes.
Step 1: Convert Letter Grades to Grade Points
Each letter grade maps to a point value on the standard 4.0 scale: A and A+ are 4.0, A- is 3.7, B+ is 3.3, B is 3.0, B- is 2.7, C+ is 2.3, C is 2.0, C- is 1.7, D+ is 1.3, D is 1.0, D- is 0.7, and F is 0.0.
A few schools award 4.3 for an A+ or use slightly different cutoffs, so check your institution's official scale. High-school weighted GPAs add extra points for honors and AP courses, which is a separate system from the unweighted college scale.
Step 2: Weight by Credit Hours
Multiply each course's grade points by its credit hours to get its quality points. A 4-credit course with an A earns 16 quality points (4.0 × 4), while a 2-credit course with an A earns only 8. Add up all the quality points, then divide by the total credit hours.
For example: an A in a 4-credit course, a B in a 3-credit course, a C in a 3-credit course and an A in a 2-credit course give 16 + 9 + 6 + 8 = 39 quality points across 12 credits, so the GPA is 39 ÷ 12 = 3.25.
Combining Terms Into a Cumulative GPA
Your cumulative GPA blends every graded term, weighted by credits. Multiply your prior GPA by its credits, add this term's GPA times its credits, and divide by the combined total. Because it is weighted, once you have many credits on record a single term moves the cumulative number only slightly — which is why raising a low GPA takes sustained effort rather than one strong semester.