The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have passed separate massive tax overhauls that the two chambers of Congress will attempt to reconcile over the coming weeks.

There has been much discussion about how the House tax bill's provision taxing tuition waivers for graduate students will effect those who receive waivers, with some saying it will raise students' taxes thousands of dollars and others saying it won't have such a huge effect. A similar measure was included in the Senate's version of the tax bill.

But two graduate students at UC Berkeley recently created a tool to help people estimate the cost of the tax bill that passed the House.

Kathy Shield, who is studying nuclear engineering, and Vetri Velan, a physics student, were worried about the potential effects of the House tax bill on graduate students, according to a press release from UC Berkeley. So, they created an online calculator that allows graduate students estimate what the Republican's House tax bill will cost them.

"The calculator aims to give graduate students a sense of how their taxes will change under the new law," Shield said in the press release. "It's designed for students who file singly, and therefore have (relatively) simple taxes, although we've also used it to look at the situations of married students, those with dependents and those who own homes.

"In each case, our calculator indicates that their taxes will increase if the changes in the House version of the tax bill go through."

Berkeley's press release said that Velan, one of the co-creators of the calculator, joined other Berkeley graduate students in a protest at Sproul Hall on Wednesday who opposed the provision in the House tax bill. The protest at Berkeley was part of a series of demonstrations held on college campuses around the country to draw attention to the potential negative effects of the House bill.

"This tax bill will be catastrophic," Velan told the crowd Wednesday, according a report from The Chronicle's Nanette Asimov. "If you're a teaching assistant, your taxes will go up $1,400."