Calculate your GPA from grades and credit hours (comma-separated).
GPA = Σ(grade point × credit hours) ÷ Σ(credit hours). Enter grade points (e.g. 4.0, 3.7, 3.3) and matching credit hours as comma-separated lists.
A GPA is only meaningful in the context of the scale it came from, and this trips up more students (and sometimes admissions readers) than it should. Unweighted GPA uses a straightforward 0.0-4.0 scale where every course counts equally regardless of difficulty — a B in AP Calculus earns exactly the same 3.0 points as a B in a standard-level Algebra class. Weighted GPA deliberately breaks that equality: it adds extra points for harder courses — commonly +0.5 for Honors classes and +1.0 for AP or IB classes — before averaging, which means a weighted GPA can legitimately exceed 4.0, something that's structurally impossible on a pure unweighted scale.
The practical size of the gap is bigger than most students expect: a student taking a genuine mix of honours and AP courses often sees their weighted GPA run 0.5 to 1.0 points higher than their unweighted GPA for the identical set of grades — one commonly cited example shows a 3.60 unweighted GPA translating to a 4.10 weighted GPA for the same transcript. There's also no single national standard for exactly how weighting is applied, so the same course load can weight differently from school to school. This matters most at the college-application stage: most US universities recalculate applicants' GPAs using their own internal formula during review specifically because they know raw weighted GPAs aren't comparable across different high schools' weighting systems — so a strategically loaded weighted GPA doesn't translate as directly into an admissions advantage as students sometimes assume.
Unweighted GPA uses a 0.0-4.0 scale where every course counts equally regardless of difficulty. Weighted GPA adds extra points for harder courses before averaging — commonly +0.5 for Honors and +1.0 for AP/IB — which means it can legitimately exceed 4.0, something impossible on a purely unweighted scale.
For a student taking a genuine mix of honours and AP courses, weighted GPA commonly runs 0.5 to 1.0 points higher than unweighted GPA for the identical grades — for example, a 3.60 unweighted GPA might correspond to roughly a 4.10 weighted GPA on the same transcript.
No — there's no single national standard for exactly how much extra weight to assign, so the same course load and grades can produce a different weighted GPA depending on the specific school's weighting policy. This inconsistency is exactly why weighted GPAs aren't directly comparable between different schools.
Often not directly — most US universities recalculate applicants' GPA using their own internal formula during admissions review, precisely because they know weighted GPA calculations vary too much between high schools to compare fairly as reported. This means a strategically high weighted GPA doesn't guarantee the same advantage in every admissions office's eyes.