How to Check Your GPA on Canvas

The short answer is the one nobody wants: Canvas does not show your GPA. There is no hidden settings toggle and no page you have failed to find. Canvas shows a percentage per course, and that is deliberate. Once you know why, getting the number yourself takes about five minutes.

Why Canvas doesn't have a GPA field

Canvas is courseware. Each Canvas course knows about its own assignments and its own weighting, and almost nothing else. A GPA needs facts that live outside any single course:

• Credit hours. A 4-credit course should pull your GPA around twice as hard as a 2-credit one. Canvas usually has no idea how many credits a course carries.
• Your school's grade scale. Whether 89.5 is an A− or a B+, and whether a B+ is worth 3.3 or 3.33, is institutional policy.
• Which courses even count. Pass/fail classes, repeated courses, withdrawals, and transfer credit all follow rules Canvas never sees.
• Weighted vs unweighted. Honours and AP bonus points are a district or university decision, applied to your transcript rather than to a Canvas course.

Publishing a GPA from inside Canvas would mean guessing at all four. A wrong GPA is worse than no GPA, so your official number lives in the student information system that holds your transcript — Banner, PeopleSoft, Workday Student, PowerSchool, or whatever your school uses.

What Canvas does show you

Canvas gives you per-course grades, which are the raw material for a GPA. To find them, open Grades from the global navigation on the left. That lists every active course with a current score.

Two things to watch before you trust those percentages:

• Ungraded work is usually excluded. Canvas computes the current grade from graded submissions only, so a course average can look better than the grade you will finish with. Toggling “Calculate based only on graded assignments” off shows the pessimistic version that treats unmarked work as zero.
• Instructors can hide totals. If a course shows no overall percentage at all, your instructor has hidden it, and no extension or trick reveals it. You can still reconstruct it from the individual assignment scores and group weights.

If you need the course percentage itself and Canvas is hiding the total, our Canvas grade calculator rebuilds it from your assignment groups and their weights.

Turning Canvas grades into a GPA

Four steps, and only the second one needs anything Canvas lacks.

1. List each course's final percentage from the Canvas Grades page.
2. Find each course's credit hours. These come from your course catalogue, registration record, or transcript — not Canvas.
3. Convert each percentage to grade points using your school's scale. On a standard plus/minus 4.0 scale, 93 and up is an A at 4.0, 90–92 an A− at 3.7, 87–89 a B+ at 3.3, and so on down.
4. Weight by credits and average. Multiply each course's grade points by its credit hours, add those up, and divide by the total credit hours. That credit-weighted mean is your GPA.

The step people get wrong is the fourth: averaging the grade points directly, ignoring credits. That is only correct when every course carries the same number of credits, which is rarely true after your first term.

Term GPA, cumulative GPA, and the one you actually need

“GPA” covers several different numbers, and people get the wrong one surprisingly often:

• Term or semester GPA — this term's courses only. This is what you can build straight out of Canvas, since those are the courses currently in front of you.
• Cumulative GPA — every course you have ever taken. Canvas cannot give you this because it does not hold your earlier terms. You need your previous GPA and total credits, then combine.
• Major GPA — courses in your field only. Your department defines the list.

For a single term, the overall GPA calculator handles it. To fold this term into your running total, the cumulative GPA calculator takes your prior GPA and credits alongside the new term. If your institution reports on a 10-point scale rather than a 4.0 one, the CGPA calculator works in that system and converts between scales.

Treat your own number as an estimate

A GPA you calculate is an estimate — a good one when your inputs match your school's rules, and misleading when they do not. The usual sources of drift:

• Schools that do not use plus/minus grades at all, where any B is a flat 3.0.
• Repeat policies, where a retake may replace the original grade or average with it.
• Honours, AP, IB, or dual-enrolment bonus points, which can push a weighted GPA above 4.0.
• Transfer credit, which often counts toward credits earned but not toward GPA.

For anything that matters — scholarship eligibility, graduate applications, academic standing — use the figure from your registrar or student portal. Use your own calculation for planning: deciding what this term needs to look like, or what it would take to pull a number up.

Common questions