Grade Point Average — that little number sitting on the corner of your high school transcript condenses your academic performance during a given time into a single figure. As the college application season creeps closer, this GPA thing starts to seem like the most important number in your life. But fear not! With a little guidance, you can make sense of this elusive GPA mystery and even learn to wield it like a pro.

What is GPA (Grade Point Average)?

First off, let’s clear up the basics. Your GPA is the cumulative average of all your grades over a certain period. That could be a quarter, semester, academic year, or high school career. However, by the time you apply to college during your senior fall, you probably will only have three years’ worth of grades (in addition to that first level of a foreign language course you hopefully took in middle school!).

When colleges look at your cumulative GPA, they’re trying to figure out how well you might do on campus, especially whether they believe you can keep up with their curriculum and stay afloat alongside all your peers.

How to Actually Calculate GPA 

Grab a calculator and try not to panic. Calculating your GPA is easier than you might think. You don’t need a Ph.D. in rocket science — just a little focus. Here’s the rundown:

• Convert Your Letter Grades to GPA Points
• Use the chart below to translate those As and Bs into GPA points.

Grade – Letter Scale	Grade – GPA Scale
A	4.0
B	3.0
C	2.0
D	1.0
F	0.0

• Multiply GPA Points by Credit Hours
• Take each course’s GPA points (e.g., a B = 3.0) and multiply it by the number of credit hours it was worth. For example, if you got a B in a 4-credit Biology course, you would do:

3.0 (B) x 4 credits = 12.

• Add Everything Together
• Do this for each class you want to include in your GPA calculation, then add all the numbers together.
• Divide by Total Credit Hours
• Add up the total number of credit hours, then divide the sum of all your weighted grades by that total. Voila! You’ve got your GPA.

What’s the Deal with Weighted GPA?

Here’s where things get a little trickier. Not all courses are created equal. Honors courses, AP, and IB get weighted more heavily when calculating your GPA by some (but not all!) high schools. These schools reason that these classes are harder and necessitate a bit of an academic boost.

At some schools, such courses are weighted by 1.1, meaning an A in an AP class doesn’t just count as a 4.0 — it’s actually worth a 4.4! So, if you get a B in an AP course, it’s not a dull old 3.0. Instead, it becomes a 3.3. This clever little weighting can boost your GPA beyond the standard 4.0. Yes, that’s right: a GPA above 4.0 is totally possible at schools that weigh GPA. 

But remember that once your transcript arrives in the hands of a college admissions officer, they will either recalculate your GPA using their own method or evaluate it in the context of how your high school calculates GPA. In other words, you won’t enjoy any advantage over a student who took the same courses as you but happened to attend a school that doesn’t weigh GPA.

A Sobering Truth About High School GPA

You better believe that highly selective colleges expect you to have an impeccable GPA. These days, with college admissions competitiveness at an all-time high, there’s very little room for those Bs and Cs on your transcript. It’s a sobering note, but it’s true! Great grades are among the mere table stakes for admission to our nation’s top schools.

Ivy Coach’s team of former elite college admissions officers knows this truth all too well. It’s our job to inform our students of the best possible school they can expect to get into, given their overall academic performance. If you would like to enlist our help in optimizing your child’s odds of admission to their dream school, fill out our complimentary consultation form and we’ll be in touch.