I am a junior in MA, and my GPA is falling behind. I go to a public school, so we aren’t special or anything. Everyone is pretty average, GPAs between 3.00 and up. Freshmen year I had a 3.78, sophomore year I had a 3.65, and right now I have a whopping 3.43. Clearly, it is decreasing. As a sophomore, I took to AP’s (world and bio) and got a B+ and A- respectfully. This year, I am taking APUSH and APComp. I have an A+ in AP Comp, but I am not doing well in APUSH with a B 
. What is really kiling my GPA right now is Calculus. I have a fat C+. I am really stressing out about how this will affect my GPA, and if my 97 in an AP class will have any compensation for my calculus grade. Thank you in advance for your help!
Every school has a different way of weighing their AP courses. Colleges do look at individual course grades so a high grade in one course is not going to make a lower grade disappear, even if you have an overall GPA boost. Talk to your teacher, get a tutor, and do what you need to do to get your math grade up.
Course type (AP, Honors, dual enrollment, etc.) has no impact on unweighted GPA. It’s simply a weighted average of all of your classes.
When looking at a student’s GPA, college admissions officers also look at course rigor - the types of courses, honors/AP levels, etc - and stongly prefer students who challenge themselves with harder classes.
Many schools have a weighted GPA that attempts to numerically reflect this course rigor with additional points added to the GPA. But there are so many different ways of doing this that using it to compare with other weighted GPAs outside of your specific school isn’t really meaningful. Many colleges will recalculate a weighted GPA using a standardized methodology. Or just ignore it and qualitatively look at unweighted GPA and course rigor.
If your grades are just letters - A, B, C, etc - then a 97 probably won’t be viewed any differently than a 91 - both as an A.
Grades, scores, etc., never “compensate” or “make up for” or “cancel out” (to use some terms frequently appearing on CC). They are just two different data points.