Harvard University GPA Calculator
Work out your Harvard College GPA using the official Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) 4.0 grading scale. Add each course, its credit hours, and your letter grade, and the calculator does the weighted average for you — no sign-up, nothing stored.
About Harvard University
Harvard University was founded in 1636. That makes it the oldest college in the United States — older than the country itself.
It was set up by the Massachusetts Bay Colony's government. Later, it was named after John Harvard, a young minister who left his book collection and half his money to the school after he passed away.
Harvard's motto is Veritas. It's a Latin word that means "truth."
The main campus sits around Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's right across the Charles River from Boston. Harvard also has buildings in Boston's Allston neighborhood and in the Longwood Medical Area.
Harvard is a private, non-profit school. It's part of the Ivy League. Its current president is Alan Garber, who took office in 2024.
Undergraduates study at Harvard College, which is part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Beyond that, Harvard has a dozen more schools for graduate and professional study. These include Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Medical School. There's also the Harvard Kennedy School, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Graduate School of Education. Rounding things out are the Graduate School of Design, the Divinity School, the School of Dental Medicine, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), plus the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
All these schools together teach roughly 20,000 students each year. Faculty include Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellows, and Pulitzer Prize winners.
Harvard also holds the largest endowment of any university in the world. That money helps pay for financial aid, research, and Harvard's library system — which is the biggest academic library system on Earth, with more than 70 individual libraries.
Admissions, Rankings & Campus Life
Harvard is one of the hardest schools to get into in the country. Each year, it accepts only a small, single-digit percentage of everyone who applies.
Admissions officers look at more than test scores or GPA. They also weigh your essays, recommendation letters, and what you've done outside the classroom.
Acceptance rates change every year, and different websites often report different numbers. For the most accurate, up-to-date figures, check the Harvard College Admissions website directly.
Once on campus, undergraduates move into one of Harvard's residential Houses after their first year. Students eat together in historic dining halls like Annenberg Hall.
There are hundreds of student groups to join — from The Harvard Crimson student newspaper to a cappella groups and research labs.
Harvard's sports teams are called the Harvard Crimson. They compete in NCAA Division I as part of the Ivy League. The football rivalry against Yale, known simply as "The Game," goes all the way back to 1875. It's one of the oldest rivalries in American college sports.
Notable Harvard Alumni
Harvard's alumni network stretches across the globe, with hundreds of thousands of graduates.
More U.S. presidents went to Harvard than to any other university. That list includes John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama.
Harvard graduates and faculty have also won more Nobel Prizes than almost any other school's.
Beyond politics and science, Harvard's alumni list includes writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and business leaders like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg.
Harvard's Official GPA Scale (FAS)
Harvard College's Faculty of Arts and Sciences converts every letter grade to grade points using the table below. Note that Harvard does not award an A+ that pushes a course above 4.00 — A is the ceiling.
| Letter Grade | Grade Points |
|---|---|
| A | 4.00 |
| A- | 3.67 |
| B+ | 3.33 |
| B | 3.00 |
| B- | 2.67 |
| C+ | 2.33 |
| C | 2.00 |
| C- | 1.67 |
| D+ | 1.33 |
| D | 1.00 |
| D- | 0.67 |
| E (failing) | 0.00 |
Non-letter designations such as ABS (absent from exam), UNS (unsatisfactory), and EXLD are also recorded as 0.00 grade points. Source: FAS Information for Faculty – Grade Point Averages.
How Harvard Calculates GPA
Harvard's GPA is the numerical average of every letter grade earned in courses taken under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for degree credit, weighted by each course's credits. That includes Harvard Summer School credit and certain pre-2024 approved cross-registration courses. It's calculated on both a cumulative basis (your full academic record) and an annual basis (one academic year at a time).
A few exclusions matter if your total doesn't match your unofficial transcript at first glance:
- Grades from other Harvard faculties (e.g., Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Extension School) or from MIT cross-registration are excluded — unless the grade is a failing grade, in which case it is included.
- Coursework completed out of residence is not counted toward the GPA.
- A standard semester-long course carries 4 credits under the FAS credit system, so most students take roughly 32 courses (128 credits) across four years.
Not every Harvard school reports a GPA. These rules apply specifically to Harvard College (FAS undergraduates). The Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), for example, does not calculate a GPA for its students at all — so if you're a GSAS student, this calculator's scale doesn't apply to your program.
Latin Honors: How GPA Cutoffs Work
Unlike many universities, Harvard does not publish a fixed GPA threshold for cum laude, magna cum laude, or summa cum laude. Instead, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sets a fresh cumulative-GPA cutoff each year so that only a targeted share of the graduating class qualifies for each honors tier. Departments first recommend students for honors, and FAS then applies that year's cutoff.
Because the cutoff is recalculated annually against each class's grade distribution, the GPA you need has generally crept upward over time as average grades have risen. As a rough guide, recent graduating classes have needed a cumulative GPA in roughly the high-3.6 to low-3.7 range to clear the cum laude bar, with magna cum laude and summa cum laude requiring progressively higher GPAs. Your concentration (major) may also set its own separate GPA requirement for departmental honors.
Frequently Asked Questions
