Grade & GPA Guides
The calculators give you the number; these guides explain the system behind it — how courses are actually graded, what rounding policies really say, and how to spend finals week where the letters move.
- How College Grading Actually WorksThe three grading systems professors actually use
- The 89.5 ProblemRounding policies
- The Finals-Week Triage MethodA grade-math approach to finals week
- GPA Systems ExplainedUnweighted vs weighted GPA
Why the system matters more than the score
An 85 means different things in a points course, a weighted course and a curved one — and a semester of grade anxiety usually traces back to not knowing which system you're standing in. Each guide above is written to be read once, early in a term, so the rest of the semester is arithmetic instead of dread. The calculators handle the arithmetic.
What to read when
Start of term: read how grading works and find your course's system in the syllabus. Mid-term wobble: the trend advice in the same guide, plus a pass through the weighted calculator with your real numbers. Three weeks before finals: the rounding guide — that's the correct moment to ask about boundaries, not after grades post. Finals week itself: triage, before you open a single notebook. And when applications or internships ask for a number, the GPA systems guide covers which number they actually mean.