How GPAWise verifies grading schemes

• 1,424universities listed
• 1,372verified against an official document
• 12countries
• 1,318distinct official sources

What "Verified" means

• A Verified badge means we found the institution's own grading document, stored its web address, and the grade table on the calculator page matches it.
• Every verified calculator page links straight to that document, so you can check it yourself.
• The "Verified Mon YYYY" date is the month the table was last confirmed against that document.
• A badge shows that the table matches what the institution publishes. It does not mean the institution endorses GPAWise — we are independent — and your official GPA is always the one your institution calculates.

What counts as an official source

• We only use documents the institution publishes itself, or documents from the national body that sets grading rules for it.
• We never use third-party GPA calculators, grade-conversion aggregators, consultancies or Wikipedia. We also never use admissions or credential-conversion tables, because those describe how someone else reads a grade, not how the institution awards it.
• When several official documents exist, we prefer them in this order: the current academic regulations or examination rules, then the official prospectus or handbook, then the course catalog.
• We check that the document is the newest version the institution lists. A document that has been replaced, or one that is not yet in force, is not used.

A few exceptions exist, and each one is decided case by case:

• When an institution's own site is down or blocks every request, we may use an archived copy of the same page. The calculator page then says (archived copy) next to the source link.
• Occasionally an institution's own document is hosted somewhere other than its website — a partner university's mirror, or a shared drive its own site links to. We accept it only once we have confirmed it is the institution's document and no copy exists on its own site.
• When a college's grading rules are set by its district or state system, we may use the system document — but only when one names the other explicitly: the college's page points to the system document, or the system document binds the college by name.
• A grading tool the institution runs on its own website is accepted only when its values agree with the institution's published text.

How a grade table is copied

• Every grade row is copied as printed: the grade label, the grade points and the marks range, together with any conditions attached to it.
• We do not invent what a document does not print. If it leaves out a boundary, a value or a scale, the gap is recorded as ambiguous and reviewed rather than filled in by guesswork.
• Where a table has to be adapted to fit — a value printed to three decimals rounded to two, a long mark-by-mark table collapsed to one row per grade — the adaptation is recorded alongside the values, so a transcribed number is never mistaken for a derived one.
• Scales are stored as the institution prints them — 4.0, 4.33, 5.0, 7-point, 10-point, non-zero floors and all — and never converted to a common scale.
• If an institution publishes marks bands but no grade points, we do not invent points. Its calculator reports a credit-weighted percentage average instead.
• The table is copied before anyone looks at what the site already shows, so the old version cannot sway the reading.
• If a document looks wrong — a typo, an overlapping band — we do not quietly fix it. It is flagged and settled by an explicit, recorded decision.

Not every institution is verified

• 52 of 1,424 universities currently carry no badge. Their calculators use a grading table that has not yet been confirmed against an official source.
• There are several reasons: some institutions do not publish their grading rules where we can reach them, some keep them behind a student login, some publish documents that contradict each other, and a few do not compute a GPA at all.
• In those cases we leave the page unverified rather than guess or borrow another institution's table. "No source found" is a normal outcome, not a failure.
• An institution that belongs to the same system as a verified one is still checked on its own.

Short names and abbreviations

• The short form after a university's name — for example "(UCLA)" — is one the institution uses for itself in its own materials.
• If an institution does not abbreviate its own name, we do not invent an abbreviation for it.

Found a mistake?

• Every calculator page has a Suggest a correction button. You can propose a changed grade table and explain why.
• Suggestions are not published automatically. They wait in a review queue until an administrator has checked them against the institution's published document, and only approved changes go live.
• Corrections our own verification process finds go through the same review queue.
• University missing? Request it. We consider requests when we choose which universities to add next.

Anything else — a broken source link, a question about a specific institution — write to info@gpawise.com or see the contact page.