Your semesters
Enter the GPA and credit hours exactly as they appear on your transcript.
Why you cannot just average your semesters
The instinct is to add up your semester GPAs and divide by how many there are, but that only works if every term carried the same credit load, which almost never happens. A twelve-credit semester and an eighteen-credit semester are not equal contributors, and treating them that way hands too much influence to the lighter one. Your registrar weights each term by the credits attached to it, and so does this calculator.
The mechanics are the same as a single-term calculation, just one level up. Each semester GPA is multiplied by that semester's credits to recover the quality points you earned, all of those are added together, and the total gets divided by every credit you have attempted. If your transcript already prints a cumulative figure, this should land within a hundredth of it.
How much a rough semester really costs
Early terms carry the most risk simply because there is nothing behind them to absorb the damage. One weak semester in your first year can knock several tenths off a cumulative average, while the same semester in your senior year barely registers against a hundred credits of history. This is the reason advisors push so hard on first-year grades, and it is also why recovery is genuinely possible once you have credits banked.
Try it yourself by adding a row for the term you are in now. Put in the GPA you think you are heading for and watch what happens to the total. Students aiming to climb back above a 2.0 or to clear a scholarship threshold usually find that the required term GPA is higher than they guessed, and knowing that early leaves time to act on it.
Transfer credits and repeated courses
Two things routinely make a hand-calculated cumulative GPA disagree with the official one. Transfer credits often count toward your degree without carrying grade points into the new school's average, so including them here will skew the result. Repeated courses are the other, since many schools replace the original grade rather than averaging the two attempts, and the old grade quietly stops counting.
When your figure and the transcript disagree by more than a rounding error, one of those two is usually behind it. If you would rather build the number from individual classes than from term averages, the college GPA calculator handles multiple semesters of courses in one go.
Common questions
How is cumulative GPA calculated?+
Multiply each semester's GPA by the credits earned that term, add those together, then divide by the total credits across all semesters. Heavier terms pull the average harder.
Why can't I just average my semester GPAs?+
Because semesters rarely carry the same number of credits. Treating a light term and a full term as equal gives the lighter one too much influence and produces a number your registrar will not recognise.
How much can one bad semester hurt me?+
Early on it can move things a lot, since there are few credits to absorb it. Past sixty credits, a single rough term shifts the total by a couple of tenths at most, and steady work afterwards pulls it back.