How High School GPA Is Calculated

The simpler of the two, and the one every school can produce:

1. Convert each course's letter grade to points: A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, D = 1.0, F = 0.0, with plus and minus grades in between if your school uses them.
2. Add the points up.
3. Divide by the number of courses.

Every course counts the same, whether it is AP Calculus or ceramics. The maximum is 4.0, and it is reached only by earning an A in everything.

Some schools do assign credits — a year-long course worth 1.0 and a semester elective worth 0.5 — and weight the average by them, exactly as a college does. If your transcript shows a credit column, that is what is happening.

Weighting adds points to harder courses before averaging, so that a demanding schedule shows up in the number rather than only in the course list. The usual bonuses:

These are common values, not a national standard. Your school decides the size of the bonus, which courses qualify for it, and whether it weights at all.

Seven year-long courses, at a school using the bonuses above:

Unweighted 3.61, weighted 3.90. Three courses carried a bonus and added 2.0 points across the year, which spread over seven courses is worth about 0.29 on the average.

Almost everything in the method above is a school decision, which is why two students with identical report cards at different schools can have different GPAs:

• Plus and minus grades. Many high schools use whole letters only, so a B+ and a B are both 3.0. If yours does, using 3.3 overstates every plus grade you have.
• Percentage ranges. An A might start at 90, at 93, or at 94. The same 92% is an A at one school and an A− at another.
• Which courses are weighted. Some weight only AP and IB; some include Honors; some weight any course on an approved list.
• The size of the bonus. +1.0 for AP is common; +0.5 and +1.5 both exist.
• Whether electives count. Some schools exclude PE, health and similar from the GPA entirely.
• Semester or year. Whether each semester grade is counted separately or averaged into one final grade first.

The authority on all of this is your student handbook or your counselor, not a general rule. If a number matters — an eligibility threshold, a scholarship, a rank cutoff — it is worth confirming which version your school uses.

Some schools record percentages rather than letters, and a few compute a GPA on a 100-point scale directly. To get a standard 4.0-scale GPA from percentages, convert to letters first:

Use your school's ranges if they differ from these. The conversion is where most of the disagreement between two GPA calculations comes from.

An admissions office comparing applicants from hundreds of high schools cannot take each school's GPA at face value, because each school computed it differently. Many recalculate from the transcript instead, and common adjustments include:

• Counting only core academic courses — English, math, science, social studies, world languages — and dropping electives.
• Using only grades from tenth grade onward.
• Stripping out weighting and recalculating unweighted, or applying the institution's own weighting uniformly.
• Converting plus and minus grades to whole letters, or the reverse.

So the GPA a college works with may be noticeably different from the one on your transcript — in either direction. Admissions offices publish their method; that is the reliable answer for any specific school, and it is worth reading rather than guessing for one you care about.

What does not change under recalculation is the course list. A transcript showing demanding courses reads as demanding whether or not the arithmetic rewards it.