GPA & Grade Converter

What this converter is, and what it is not

The tool above maps a grade from one scale onto the nearest point on another. That is a useful thing to have when you are filling in a form or working out whether you are in the right range to apply. It is not, and cannot be, an official conversion, and no free tool anywhere is. This section explains why, so that you use the number above for the thing it is good for and do not rely on it for the thing it cannot do.

The short version: a grade is not a measurement of you. It is the output of one institution's rules about how work is marked, how marks are combined, and how the resulting distribution is shaped. Two students with the same number from two different systems have not demonstrated the same thing, and everybody who assesses foreign qualifications for a living knows it.

Why no conversion is authoritative

Four separate things differ between systems, and each one on its own would be enough to make a single mapping unsafe.

The shape of the distribution. Some systems are designed so that the top grade is common and expected of a strong student. Others are designed so that the top grade is rare and a mid band is the normal outcome for a good one. Mapping the numbers onto each other without accounting for how often each is awarded transfers the number and destroys the meaning.

What gets counted. A final classification may be built from every module you ever took, or from the final two years only, or from a weighted subset, or from a dissertation and a handful of exams. Two systems can produce the same headline figure from completely different underlying work.

Where the pass line sits. The distance between the pass mark and the top mark is not the same in every system, and it is not even linear within one. In several widely used scales, the usable range in practice occupies a small part of the nominal range, which means a naive proportional mapping compresses or stretches exactly the region that matters.

Direction. Not every scale runs the same way. In some, the best grade is the lowest number. A converter that gets the direction wrong produces an answer that looks plausible and is exactly inverted, which is the most dangerous kind of wrong.

What an admissions office actually does

This is the part that most guidance skips, and it is the part that determines your outcome.

An admissions office does not usually convert your grade at all. It compares your transcript against a reference for your country and your institution, and it asks a narrower question than the one you are asking: does this applicant meet our published entry requirement for their system? Most institutions publish requirements per country precisely because they do not want to convert. If the requirement for your country is expressed in your country's own scale, the conversion is irrelevant and the only number that matters is the one already on your transcript.

Where an office cannot answer that itself, it uses a credential evaluation service or a national information centre for the recognition of qualifications. Those bodies do not publish universal conversion tables either. They issue a statement about a specific document from a specific institution, which is a different and much stronger claim than a table.

The four families of scale, and what each rewards

Almost every scale you will meet belongs to one of four families. Recognising the family is more useful than memorising a number.

  FAMILY            RUNS            TYPICAL SHAPE
  +==============+===============+==========================+
  point average    low to high     fine grained, cumulative
  percentage       low to high     wide nominal, narrow real
  classification   banded          few bands, hard thresholds
  inverted scale   high to low     best grade is lowest number

Point averages aggregate every course you took, weighted by credit. They reward consistency and punish a single bad term in a way a banded system does not.

Percentage systems look continuous and are not. In several of them the marks actually awarded cluster in a band far below the nominal maximum, so the gap between a good mark and an excellent one is much smaller than the numbers suggest.

Classification systems collapse everything into a few bands. Inside a band there is no distinction at all, and one mark either side of a threshold changes the label completely. This is why applicants from these systems are often asked for a transcript as well as a classification.

Inverted scales run best to worst as the number rises. They are internally consistent and they are the ones most often mishandled by tools and by applicants filling in forms.

Where credit weighting changes the answer

If your system computes an average across courses, the weight attached to each course is part of the grade. A course worth more credit moves the average more. This has two practical consequences.

First, when you enter grades into any calculator, enter the credit values too, and enter the ones your institution used rather than the ones you assume. Our GPA calculator takes credit weights for exactly this reason, and the answer changes materially if you leave them equal when they were not.

Second, if your transcript shows courses that were graded but not credit bearing, find out whether your institution included them. Institutions differ, and the difference can move a borderline average across a threshold.

How to use a converted number safely

There are three uses that are legitimate and one that is not.

Legitimate: orientation. Working out roughly where you sit so you can decide which institutions are worth applying to. A rough number is fine for this, because the decision it feeds is itself rough.

Legitimate: filling a form that demands it. Some application systems require a converted figure. Enter the converted figure, attach the original transcript, and state the original scale explicitly. The transcript governs.

Legitimate: checking a claim. If somebody has told you that your grade does or does not meet a requirement, a conversion lets you sanity check it before you accept the answer.

Not legitimate: replacing the published requirement. If an institution publishes a requirement for your country, that requirement is the one that decides. A conversion that says you qualify does not qualify you, and a conversion that says you do not may simply be wrong about your system.

Three questions worth asking before you apply

Ask them in writing, and keep the answer.

Which grades do you count? Whole degree, final year, final two years, or a specified subset. This determines whether an early weak term matters at all.

Do you require a credential evaluation? If so, from which body, and does it need to arrive before or after an offer. Evaluation takes time you must plan for, and it is a queue you do not control.

Do you publish a requirement for my country? If the answer is yes, ask for the link, and stop converting.

The conversion checklist

Work through this once per application, and print it.

Print this checklist

Where the numbers in this tool come from

The mapping above is built from the structural relationships between the scales: their direction, their pass thresholds, and their band boundaries where those are formally defined. It is not derived from any national conversion table, because none of the bodies that could publish one does. Where a mapping would require an assumption about how often a grade is awarded, we have used the band boundaries rather than inventing a distribution, which is why the tool warns you when a value falls outside the range a scale actually uses.

That is the same rule the rest of this site runs on and it is set out in our editorial policy: publish the mechanism, publish the limits, and do not dress an estimate up as a fact. If you are working out where to apply rather than how to convert, how to choose a study destination starts from constraints rather than from rankings, and the application document checklist covers what your transcript needs to be accompanied by.