GPACalcTools does not put a made-up "academic team" on its byline. One person writes the grading guides, and one person owns the site and checks the calculators behind them.
Jessica Martinez
Contributing Writer, Business & Finance
Jessica writes the grading guides on this site: how to calculate a GPA by hand, the 4.0 scale and its plus-minus variants, weighted versus unweighted GPA, and how much a single semester actually moves a cumulative number. Grading was not her original beat. For six years before she wrote for a living, she worked as a credit analyst, reading consumer loan files closely enough to catch a figure that did not match its backup documentation. GPACalcTools is where that same habit gets pointed at school policy instead of a loan file: a stated grade-point value, a weighting bonus, a percentage cutoff, checked against a real registrar's policy or a source such as the Common App's own guidance on self-reported scales, rather than repeated from whatever a search result said first.
Her byline appears on How to Calculate GPA, GPA Scale and Letter Grades, Weighted vs. Unweighted GPA, What Is a Good GPA, How to Raise Your GPA, GPA Needed for College, and the Complete Guide to GPA & Grades. She also writes loan and paycheck guides for LoanCalcTools and PaystubTools, and home-project guides for HomeImprovCalc, sibling sites under the same review process.
Before a page of hers publishes: every worked GPA or grade example is run by hand a second time with different numbers, not just checked for internal consistency. A claim about a grading convention, the 4.0 scale, the common AP or honors bonus, a percentage-to-letter cutoff, is labeled as a convention rather than a rule, because no single national body sets it; individual schools and districts do. Where the site cites an outside source, such as how the Common App asks students to self-report a GPA scale, that claim is traced to the organization's own published guidance rather than a secondhand summary. Worked examples use round, clearly hypothetical grades and credit hours so nobody mistakes an illustration for a transcript. Chris Terry (below) reviews a draft against those checks before it publishes.
Chris Terry
Owner and Editor, Encore Promotional Products
Chris owns and operates GPACalcTools and the other calculator sites in the Encore Editorial network through Encore Promotional Products. He is not a teacher, a school counselor or an admissions officer, and this site does not pretend otherwise. He built the calculators, sets the sourcing standard laid out on the editorial standards page, and is the final check on every grading convention before a page ships.
What he checks: that a claim about a grading convention is labeled as a convention rather than presented as a national rule, that the arithmetic behind every calculator, the quality-points formula, the weighted-average solve, the fraction and algebra rules, matches standard math rather than a shortcut, and that a reader-reported error gets corrected and dated the same week it is reported. He also answers the contact form when a reader flags something that looks off.
Why there is no guidance-counselor byline here
Some education sites put a school counselor's or admissions consultant's name on every page, whether or not that person wrote a word of it. GPACalcTools does not do that. Jessica is not a teacher or a counselor either, and her byline reads "Contributing Writer," not something more credentialed than the job actually is. If a page here ever carries a credentialed reviewer's byline, it will be because that person genuinely wrote or reviewed the page, and this section will name the credential so you can check it. Until then, every grading guide flags, repeatedly, that a convention can vary by school and that a calculator result is a planning number, not a substitute for reading your own school's grading policy.
How to reach us
Spotted a grade-point value, a weighting bonus, or a percentage cutoff that does not match how your school actually grades? Use the contact form. Messages go to Chris directly, and a correction to a published figure is dated on the page it appears on, not quietly rewritten.