In today’s article, I will be teaching you the easiest method to calculate CGPA in University.

What is CGPA

CGPA stands for Cumulative Grade Point Average. This is determined at the end of each academic year in school.

To calculate your CGPA, you need to first arrive at each semester’s Grade Point Average, also known as the semester’s GPA.

Next, you need to know the number of courses you are offering for the semesters (1^st and 2^nd semester), then determine how many semesters you require to complete before graduation, better still, the number of year your course will take and the total semesters on the whole.

I will break it down;

If you are studying Economics for example, you are expected to be in school for four (4) years (that’s without any carryover courses). There are two (2) semesters in each years, meaning you have 2 x 4 = 8 semesters in whole before graduation from the university.

The next thing you should determine is your school’s grading structure. I will show you the typical 5 point scale used by most universities today in the table below;

Table 1

One very important thing to know is the credit unit that each course (subject) you offer carries. Credit Unit is that figure (unit) assigned to each course. For example, if you offer 5 courses (1) introduction to Economics (2) Advanced Economics (3) Accounting (4) Statistics (5) Research methodology, and lets say each of the mentioned courses is assigned the following credit units as shown in table below;

Table 2

You are expected to remember the credit units for each of the courses and the total credit unit listed above before moving to calculate your GPA and CGPA.

How to calculate GPA

GPA is arrived at by dividing your total grade point by your total credit units.

Total Grade Point is gotten by multiplying your actual score grade (e.g. A, B, C etc) in a subject or course by the Credit Unit assigned to that course or subject in which you scored that grade. Then summing up the entire figures. See sample below for reference;

How To Calculate Total Grade Point

Add up the credit units together; 2 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 6 = 15 (as shown in table 1).

How to Arrive at Your GPA

To arrive at your GPA you need to divide your Total Grade Point by Total Credit Unit, that is; 60/15 = 4.0

GPA = 4.0

How to calculate CGPA

To calculate your CGPA students have to add up first semester GPA with second semester GPA then divide by 2

For example, since the first semester GPA is 4.00, let’s assume the second semester becomes 4.50, our CGPA becomes 4.00 + 4.50 = 8.5; 8.5/2 = 4.25 (which is strong second class upper).

Let’s now see how we arrived at the second class upper (that is 2.1) classification with the table below;

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