Weighted and unweighted GPA on the 4.0 scale — for high school, junior high or college, with or without credit hours.
Your grades are worked out on this device and never sent anywhere.
A GPA is a weighted average of your grades, where the weight is how much each course counts. The whole thing is three steps:
So an A in a 4-credit course and a B in a 3-credit course give 16 + 9 = 25 quality points across 7 credits, which is 3.57 — not 3.5, because the A carried more weight.
An unweighted GPA ignores how hard the course was — an A in AP Physics and an A in study hall are both 4.0 — so it tops out at 4.0, or 4.3 if your school gives an A+ that much. A weighted GPA adds points for harder courses — most commonly 0.5 for Honors and 1.0 for AP or IB — so it can climb well past 4.0. The same report card produces both, which is why a student can honestly say they have a 3.8 and a 4.3.
There is no national standard for this. Some districts weight AP by 1.0, others by 0.5, others not at all. That is also why most colleges recalculate GPA themselves from the transcript rather than trusting the number the school printed.
Junior high and middle schools, and plenty of high schools, do not assign credit hours — every subject simply counts once. Switch Credit hours to “No credits” and the calculator averages the grade points instead of weighting them. Six courses, six grades, one straight average.
Do not mix the two. A course left without credit hours cannot be weighted, so it is flagged by row number and left out of the GPA rather than counted as zero — the warning tells you which rows, and the total credits shown will be lower than you expect until you fill them in.
If your report card shows percentages rather than letters, set Enter grades as to Percentage. The calculator uses the common US mapping — 97 and above is an A+, 93–96 an A worth 4.0, 90–92 an A− worth 3.7, 87–89 a B+ worth 3.3, and so on down to below 65 as an F. The one thing worth checking is your own school's cut-offs, because the boundary between an A− and a B+ moves around more than people expect, and a single course sitting on that line can shift a GPA by a few hundredths.
Your cumulative GPA is not the average of your semester GPAs — it is all your quality points over all your credits. A strong term with few credits moves it less than a weak term with many. Enter your previous GPA and the credits behind it, and the calculator rebuilds those quality points before adding this term's.
The target field works the same arithmetic backwards: give it the GPA you want and the credits you plan to take, and it returns the term GPA that gets you there — or tells you plainly when the target is out of reach on your scale, which is more useful than an impossible number.
If the answer comes back higher than you expected, that is the credits behind you doing the work rather than the grades ahead of you. There is a full write-up of why in How to Raise Your GPA, including what a perfect term is actually worth at 15, 60 and 120 credits.