How Transcript Upload Works

What It Does

The transcript upload feature uses AI to read your transcript — PDF or image — and extract every course, grade, and credit hour automatically. Instead of typing in your GPA and hoping you remembered it correctly, you upload the document and let the system calculate it from the source data.

The Process

1. Upload — Drag and drop or click to upload a PDF, JPEG, or PNG of your transcript. Maximum file size is 10MB. The document should show your course history with grades and credit hours.
2. AI Extraction — The system reads your transcript using AI vision and extracts course names, codes, grades, credit hours, semesters, and years. It also identifies the institution name. This typically takes 10 to 20 seconds.
3. Review — You see a table of every extracted course. You can edit any field — fix a misread grade, adjust credit hours, add a missing course, or remove a duplicate. A confidence score tells you how reliable the extraction was. Below 70%, review carefully.
4. Save — When you confirm, the courses are saved to your account and your GPA is calculated from the actual course data. This GPA replaces any manually entered value.

GPA Calculation

The calculated GPA uses the standard 4.0 scale with credit-hour weighting. Courses with excluded grades (P, NP, W) are not counted in the GPA calculation but are tracked for your records. The calculation is:

GPA = Σ(grade points × credits) / Σ(graded credits)

Multi-Institution Support

If you attended multiple universities — transfer students, dual-degree holders, or anyone with coursework from more than one institution — you can upload multiple transcripts. Each upload is tagged with the institution name detected by the AI (or you can set it manually). Your profile then shows:

• Cumulative GPA — All courses from all institutions
• Per-institution GPA — Each university separately
• Best consecutive years GPA — Useful for Canadian medical schools that consider your best 2 or 3 years

For Canadian Medical School Applicants

Several Canadian medical schools (UBC, Western, Queen's, and others) use a "best consecutive years" GPA calculation rather than a straight cumulative GPA. If you have uploaded your courses with year data, AdmitBase automatically calculates your best 2 and best 3 consecutive academic years GPA. This can make a meaningful difference — one weak first-year semester does not have to define your entire application.

Tips

• Use official transcripts — Unofficial ones work, but official PDFs tend to have cleaner formatting and higher extraction accuracy.
• Check semester/year data — The best-consecutive-years calculation depends on courses being tagged with the correct academic year.
• Review edge cases — Transfer credits, AP credits, and courses with unusual grading scales may need manual adjustment.