College HOPE Eligibility Calculation Service

Georgia Student Finance Commission

The College HOPE Eligibility Calculation Service (CHECS) provides a central calculation system for Georgia’s Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally (HOPE) programs. CHECS calculates the academic eligibility of HOPE scholarship, Zell Miller scholarship, HOPE grant, and Zell Miller grant students attending Georgia’s 83 HOPE-eligible, postsecondary institutions. Prior to the implementation of CHECS, educational institutions were solely responsible for creating and using their own technology for calculating ongoing HOPE eligibility for their students, and they employed various methods to share the information with students. However, the Georgia General Assembly transferred the responsibility for calculating ongoing eligibility to the Georgia Student Finance Commission. Launched in 2018, CHECS calculates HOPE GPA and Checkpoint status for about 320,000 college students in Georgia, thereby determining their academic eligibility for lottery-funded scholarships and grants, which totaled $671 million in FY 2018. CHECS provides students with their HOPE status through the GAfutures.org website.