High School GPA Calculator
Mark each course as regular, honors or AP/IB to see your unweighted and weighted GPA side by side.
Entering your courses
Use the course type column to mark honors and AP/IB classes. Leave it on Regular for everything else, including electives and physical education — most schools do not add weight to those. The result panel shows both numbers at once, so you can see how much the weighting actually buys you.
Weighted and unweighted are different questions
Unweighted GPA treats an A in an AP course exactly like an A in a regular course. It is the number most scholarships and the Common App ask for, and it is the one that is comparable between schools.
Weighted GPA adds a bonus to harder courses, which is why the same transcript can produce a 3.8 unweighted and a 4.4 weighted. It measures the difficulty of your schedule, not just your grades — and every district defines it differently.
Typical weighting on a 5.0 scale
| Letter | Regular | Honors | AP / IB |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 4.0 | 4.5 | 5.0 |
| B | 3.0 | 3.5 | 4.0 |
| C | 2.0 | 2.5 | 3.0 |
| D | 1.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 |
| F | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
Three variants show up constantly in real school handbooks: honors worth +0.5 and AP worth +1.0; a flat +1.0 for any advanced course; and a capped scale where no single course can exceed 5.0. The calculator implements the first one and caps each course at 5.0, which matches the most common arrangement.
Worked example
A sophomore with four courses:
| Course | Type | Grade | Credits | Unweighted pts | Weighted pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AP Biology | AP | A− | 1 | 3.7 | 4.7 |
| Honors English | Honors | B+ | 1 | 3.3 | 3.8 |
| Algebra II | Regular | A | 1 | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| World History | Regular | B | 1 | 3.0 | 3.0 |
| Average | 4 | 3.50 | 3.88 |
Same four grades, 0.38 apart. That gap is the entire reason weighted GPA exists — and also why colleges that want to compare applicants fairly strip it back out.
How colleges actually read it
Most selective US colleges recalculate GPA from your transcript using their own formula. They commonly drop non-academic courses, ignore senior-year grades that arrive after the decision, and either re-weight AP/IB or ignore weighting entirely. A 4.4 weighted GPA from a school that weights everything is worth less than a 4.0 unweighted from a school that weights nothing, which is why the unweighted number is the safer one to quote on an application.
Common questions
Should I report weighted or unweighted GPA?
Report what the application asks for, in the format it asks for. If there is a free-text field, give both — “3.8 unweighted / 4.4 weighted” is unambiguous and prevents the reader from assuming the wrong scale.
Does an AP course raise my GPA even if I fail the AP exam?
Yes. The bonus comes from the course designation on your transcript, not from the exam score. The exam result only matters for college credit, where a 3, 4 or 5 may earn placement depending on the school's policy.
Can weighted GPA go above 5.0?
Not on a 5.0 scale — the ceiling is per course. On a 6.0 scale (used by a minority of districts) the same A in an AP class can be worth 6.0, and a 5.2 GPA is normal there. If your number looks impossible, you are reading it against the wrong scale.
Do freshman grades count?
For your school's own GPA, yes. For college admission, the University of California system and a number of others explicitly compute GPA from sophomore and junior year, and some ignore freshman year entirely. That is a policy question for each college, not something a calculator can settle.