Weighted GPA Calculator

Weighted GPA adds bonus points for advanced courses — commonly +0.5 for honors and +1.0 for AP or IB on a 4.0 base scale, capped at 5.0 per course. Unweighted GPA treats every course on the same 4.0 scale regardless of difficulty.

High schools use weighted GPAs for class rank and honors recognition; colleges may recalculate on their own scale for admissions. Always check your school's transcript legend before comparing to this calculator.

Example: an A (4.0 base) in AP English becomes 5.0 weighted; an A in a regular course stays 4.0. Two AP As and two regular Bs weighted differently than the same grades unweighted.

Weighting schemes are set locally and vary more than most families expect. Some districts add +1.0 for AP and IB and +0.5 for honours; others give +0.5 to everything advanced; a few run a 6.0 scale, and some weight only the final grade rather than each term. Because of this, weighted GPAs are close to meaningless across school boundaries.

The bonus applies to the earned grade, so a weighted GPA rewards difficulty only when you do well. A B in an AP course with a +1.0 bonus is worth 4.0 — the same as an A in a regular class — but a C becomes 3.0, no better than a B elsewhere. Taking the harder course helps rank only if the grade holds up.

Most selective colleges recalculate anyway. Admissions offices commonly strip weighting, drop non-academic courses such as PE and study hall, and rebuild a core-subject GPA on their own scale so applicants from different districts can be compared. That recalculated figure, not your district's weighted number, is often what an admissions file shows.

Class rank is usually the number that actually depends on weighting, which is why course selection matters mechanically. Two students with identical letter grades can rank differently purely on how many weighted courses they carried, and a schedule loaded with unweighted electives can cost rank even with straight As.

Report both figures when an application asks. Unweighted GPA is the comparable measure across schools and the one to use when a form does not specify; weighted GPA is the internal measure for honour roll, rank, and district recognition. Check your transcript legend to see which one your school reports by default.

Use unweighted GPA for cross-school comparison; use weighted for internal rank and honor roll if your district publishes weighted.