What’s my GPA and what do I need to keep the scholarship?

Each letter grade has a point value — A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, D = 1.0, F = 0.0 — and each course contributes that value multiplied by its credit hours. Add up all those grade points, divide by the total credit hours attempted, and that is your GPA. A student with an A in a 4-credit course and a C in a 2-credit course has (4×4 + 2×2) ÷ 6 = 3.33, not the 3.0 you would get by averaging the letters.

Unweighted GPA caps every course at 4.0 no matter how hard it is. Weighted GPA adds a bonus for advanced work — commonly 1.0 for AP or IB and 0.5 for honors — so it can exceed 4.0. Weighted rewards taking a harder schedule; unweighted is the one that compares cleanly across schools, which is why most colleges recalculate it themselves.

Only on a weighted scale. On an unweighted 4.0 scale the arithmetic maximum is 4.0. Weighted scales commonly top out at 5.0 where AP courses carry a full extra point, and a few schools use 4.5 or 6.0 scales. Since the ceiling is a local decision, a weighted GPA means nothing without knowing the scale it came from.

On the common scale A− is 3.7, B+ is 3.3, B− is 2.7 and so on, while a plain A is 4.0. Many institutions do not award an A+ above 4.0, which means the pluses cannot fully offset the minuses — a transcript of A− and B+ grades averages roughly 3.5, not the 3.85 the letters suggest.

The most common floor is 3.0 cumulative, with competitive merit awards asking for 3.5 or higher and some honors programs 3.7. But the number is set by the awarding body, not by a national rule, and federal aid uses satisfactory academic progress standards instead — which combine a GPA minimum, a credit-completion rate and a maximum timeframe. Read your specific award letter.

Take the GPA you must reach, multiply by the total credits you will have after this term, subtract the grade points you have already banked, and divide by the credits you are taking now. If the answer comes out above 4.0 it cannot be done in a single term, and you should be talking to an advisor about a longer plan or an appeal rather than hoping.

Sometimes. Grade replacement policies, where the new grade supersedes the old one in the GPA, are common but usually limited — often only for grades below C, only once per course, and only a set number of times per degree. Where the policy is grade forgiveness rather than replacement, both attempts stay on the transcript and both may still count for scholarship or graduate-school recalculations.

A W carries no grade points, so it does not move the GPA itself — which is why withdrawing before the deadline is often better than failing. It does count as attempted credits for financial-aid completion rules, though, so repeated withdrawals can cost you eligibility even while your GPA looks healthy.

A pass normally carries credit but no grade points, so it is excluded from the GPA calculation entirely. A fail, on many campuses, does count as 0.0 and does damage the average. Check which convention applies before electing pass/fail as a way to protect a GPA.

There is no official conversion. The common shortcut scales the percentage linearly — 88 out of 100 becomes (88 ÷ 100) × 4.0 = 3.52 — but institutions normally map ranges to letters first, so 88 might be a B+ worth 3.3. Use the linear figure for a ballpark and the letter mapping for anything that matters.

Usually the credits transfer but the grade points do not: the course counts towards your degree requirements while your GPA restarts at the new institution. That means transfer students often cannot dilute a weak GPA by bringing in strong grades from elsewhere, and graduate programs frequently recalculate across every transcript anyway.

It depends entirely on how many credits you already have. A 2.0 term of 15 credits pulls a 3.5 cumulative built on 30 credits down to about 3.0, but the same term against 90 existing credits only drops it to roughly 3.29. Early terms carry disproportionate weight, and late terms are correspondingly hard to recover with.