High School GPA Calculator

How this is calculated

Both GPAs are the same calculation — quality points divided by credits — run over the same transcript twice. Each course turns its letter grade into grade points, multiplies by its credits to give quality points, and the average is all the quality points over all the credits. The only difference is that the weighted pass adds a bonus to courses your district counts as harder.

Worked through with the example the page loads with — seven 1-credit courses on whole letters, under the honors +0.5 / AP +1.0 rule. Two A's and a B in regular courses, an A and a B in honors, an A in AP US History and a B in AP Calculus: that comes to 25 unweighted quality points over 7 credits: a 3.57. The two AP courses add 1.0 each and the two honors courses add 0.5 each — 3 bonus points — so the weighted total is 28 over the same 7 credits, an exact 4.00. Same grades, same credits, two numbers 0.43 apart.

The bonus is policy, and districts genuinely disagree

There is no national weighting standard. Three published policies, applied to those same seven courses, give three different answers:

Two districts in the same state, 300 miles apart, weight the same AP course at 1.0 and 2.0. That spread is why the three parts of the rule — the bonus size, the lowest grade that earns it, and whether the total is capped — are inputs on this page rather than constants baked into it. Your school's student handbook or course catalogue states its version; type that in, and the number this page gives you is the one your transcript will.

What it assumes

• The bonus is added per credit, not per course. A +1.0 bonus on a 1-credit year-long course is worth 1 quality point; on a 0.5-credit semester course it is worth 0.5. That keeps a semester course from counting as much as a year one, which is the same reason credits weight the grades themselves.
• A failed course earns no bonus. Every policy cited here says so in some form — an F is 0 quality points whatever the course was. Where the floor sits above an F (Broward and UC both require a C) the tool applies that instead; it's the “lowest grade points that earn it” setting.
• When a cap binds, the largest bonuses count first. UC allows a maximum of 8 honors points, and a student with more eligible courses than that picks which to use. The tool spends the cap on the biggest bonuses, which is the best case and what anyone filling in the form would choose.
• A blank grade means in progress, not zero. Those credits stay out of both figures until a grade exists. An F, by contrast, is a real 0.0 counted at full credit weight.
• Whole letters by default. Most high schools grade A–F with no plus or minus in the GPA. If yours puts an A− at 3.7, switch the scale; if it uses something else, type grade points into the grade boxes directly.

Where this stops being right

• Which courses count at all. Some districts leave PE, health and electives out of the GPA entirely; UC counts only approved A–G academic courses, and only those taken from the summer after 9th grade through the summer after 11th. Enter the courses your school counts — the tool averages what you give it.
• Which courses qualify as “honors”. A course being called honors by your school doesn't make it weighted everywhere. UC weights school-designated honors courses only for California residents and only when the course is UC-certified; out-of-state applicants get the extra point for AP and IB alone.
• Grade forgiveness and retakes. Districts differ on whether a repeated course replaces the original grade or both stay in the average. Broward computes its GPAs over courses “not forgiven”, which presumes a forgiveness policy this tool knows nothing about. Enter only the attempts your school counts.
• Exam requirements. Broward awards its AP bonus only where the AP exam was actually taken. If your district has a rule like that and you skipped the exam, mark the course as regular.
• College GPAs work differently. Universities weight by credit hours, not course difficulty, and a graduate school will not care what your high school added for AP. For a college transcript use the cumulative GPA calculator.
• This is not your official GPA. Your school computes the GPA of record and colleges recompute their own. If your report card disagrees with this page, it is right.

Sources

The averaging needs no authority. The bonus does — every figure the presets use is taken from a published policy, and they are cited here partly as evidence for the claim this tool is built on: that there is no single right number.

St. Johns County School District (FL), GPAs Explained: a weighted GPA includes “additional weight for honors (0.5 weight) and Advanced Placement (AP), Dual Enrollment (DE), Advanced International Certificate of Education (AICE), or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses (1.0 weight).” The district's table puts an A in an AP course at 5.0 and an A in honors at 4.5, and an F at 0 in all three columns.

Broward County Public Schools (FL), High School Grading & Grade Point Averages: the unweighted GPA is “the cumulative, unweighted average of grade points earned in all high school courses not forgiven”, while the weighted one adds 1.0 bonus quality point per credit for honors and 2.0 for AP, AICE, IB and dual enrollment — conditional on a grade of C or above, and on the AP exam being taken.

University of California, GPA requirement: convert A–G course grades to points (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1), then add “an extra point for each semester of a UC honors-level course”, to a “maximum of 8 points between 10th and 11th grades”. “Grades of D or F in an honors course do not earn an extra point.”

These three are cited as published, verifiable examples, not as the policy governing your transcript. Yours states its own version, and that is the one that counts. What they establish between them is the point: the average is fixed arithmetic, and the bonus is a local decision.

Last reviewed: August 2026