Grading systems by country

• 1. Introduction

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  Grading systems by country is a subject that exposes one of education's most contested questions: what does a number, or a letter, actually mean? In Denmark, the highest grade a student can earn is a 12. In Iran, it is a 20. In South Korea's high schools, the top grade goes not to the student who scores highest on a test, but to those whose raw score places them in the top 1 percent of peers nationwide. In Russia, a 5 is considered excellent; in the Netherlands, a 5 is barely passing, and a 9 or 10 is so rare it is awarded in only about 2 percent of large examinations combined. These numbers are not just administrative conventions. They encode deep assumptions about what education is for, who counts as exceptional, and whether achievement should be measured against an absolute standard or against the performance of one's classmates. The documentary that follows asks how and why the world's grading systems diverged so sharply, what strange corner cases each system has produced, and what happens when a student trained under one system arrives at a university built around another.

• 2. Letters, Numbers, and Points

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  Afghanistan assigns the highest score of 100 at schools and requires a minimum of 40 to pass, but universities raise that minimum to 55 -- a threshold that before 2016 was set at 50. That single number, 55, is the product of a deliberate institutional decision to demand more from students entering higher education. The same logic plays out differently almost everywhere else. Bangladesh assigns letter grades at secondary level on a 5-point GPA scale where an A-plus tops out at 5.00, while universities use a CGPA scale running to 4.00. A student who scores 80 percent in secondary school earns an A at 4.00, but that same score in a Bangladeshi public university earns an A at 3.75 -- a reminder that the label and the number can shift meaning depending on which institution holds the pen.

  India layers its systems by institution type. Central universities and state boards use percentage, while the Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institutes of Technology, and Indian Institutes of Information Technology use a 10-point GPA. The University of Mumbai introduced its own eight-point GPA in the 2012-2013 academic year, adding yet another scale to a country where a score of 60 percent at one university may equal a U.S. grade of A, while the same percentage at another earns a C-plus. The World Education Services conversion table for Indian universities maps 60-100 percent to a U.S. GPA range of 3.5-4.0, but notes that at certain institutions grades as low as 35 percent are considered passing.

  Vietnam compresses all of this to a single 10-point scale where, as the source observes, a grade of 10 or 9 is nearly impossible. Students rarely score above 8.0 on final results, meaning the top two integers of the scale are functionally decorative -- a built-in acknowledgment that perfection is not an expected outcome of education.

• 3. The Relative Grade

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  South Korea's high school system makes explicit what many other systems leave implied. From the 10th through 12th grade, the percentage shown on a student's record is not their raw test score. It is their relative standing among all students who took the same subject. The top 1 percent earn Grade 1; the next band, from 1 to 4 percent, earn Grade 2; Grade 10 goes to those who fall in the bottom 0-1 percent of test-takers. A student who answers 95 percent of questions correctly could still receive a low grade if their peers performed equally well. The system has no absolute floor for excellence -- only relative position matters.

  Norway's universities went through a related transformation in the early 2000s, when they adopted the European Credit Transfer System. Before 2003, the most common university scale ran from 1.0 (highest) to 6.0 (lowest), with 4.0 as the lowest passing grade. After 2003, the scale switched to the A-through-F letter system where E is the minimum pass. Students who began their degrees before the switch graduated with transcripts containing grades from both systems -- a documentary artifact of the transition that made international comparison even harder for that cohort.

  Denmark went furthest in making its system explicit. Its current scale, syv-trins-skalaen, was introduced in 2007 to replace the old 13-skala. It spans the range 12 to -3, with seven grades total: 12, 10, 7, 4, 02, 00, and -3. The scale is officially described as absolute, meaning proportions are not supposed to factor into how it is applied. But the unusual numbering -- chosen to align with the European ECTS scale -- makes any intuitive reading of a Danish transcript impossible without a conversion table.

• 4. Honoring the Exceptional

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  Austria uses grades 1 through 5, where 1 is the best and 5 is failing. Within that plain structure, the system hides one of the most elaborate honors mechanisms in any national grading framework. A student who earns an overall grade of 1.5 or better with no grade below 3 receives a designation called mit ausgezeichnetem Erfolg bestanden -- passed with distinction. If a student maintains this standard across their entire university career and also completes every program in the standard allotted time, they become eligible for the promotio sub auspiciis presidentis rei publicae: a graduation ceremony attended personally by the President of Austria. Only about 1 in 2,500 graduates, or 0.04 percent, achieves this each year.

  Italy's university system traces its own logic back to a tradition of three oral examiners. Each examiner historically rated a student on a 1-10 scale. The sum of those three ratings produced the final grade, setting the minimum pass at 18 (three examiners each awarding the minimum pass of 6) and the maximum at 30. That three-examiner format has changed over time, but the 18-30 scale persisted. The highest grade, 30, can be augmented with a cum laude notation -- written in Italian as e lode -- reserved for truly outstanding work. The same augmentation applies to the degree scale, which runs to 110, meaning the highest possible degree result is listed as 110 e lode.

  Belgium reserves its own honors language for university averages. A weighted average of around 14 out of 20 earns a cum laude distinction; around 16 earns magna cum laude; and around 18 earns summa cum laude or maxima cum laude. The exact thresholds differ between universities, which means two Belgian graduates holding cum laude degrees may have crossed different numerical bars to earn them.

• 5. Passing Lines and Their Consequences

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  The Netherlands applies one of the more mathematically explicit passing thresholds in its secondary system. A score of 5.5 is a pass; 5.4 is a fail. When grades are expressed to one decimal place, a raw score of 5.49 rounds up to 5.5 and passes. But when grades are expressed as whole numbers at the end of the year, that same 5.49 rounds down to 5 and fails. The gap between promotion and repetition of a school year can come down to whether a decimal place is reported or suppressed. On large exams, a 9 is awarded in about 1.5 percent of cases and a 10 in about 0.5 percent.

  Lebanon illustrates a different problem with passing lines: the scale itself may be misleading. Schools offering the Lebanese or French Baccalaureate formally use a 0-20 scale, but teachers often avoid the upper range. In essay writing, some schools cap the highest achievable score at 14 out of 20, with the class average typically landing around 9 or 10. A student who earns 12.575 as their Moyenne Generale -- the weighted average across all subjects, calculated by multiplying each subject grade by its weekly credit hours -- holds what the source describes as a good average, roughly equivalent to a B-plus or A-minus in a U.S. context. Students graduating with a Lebanese or French Baccalaureate enter universities as second-year students, not first-year, and can finish degrees in three years rather than four.

  Romania applies its own precision to the fail line. In secondary school and university, 5 is the minimum passing grade on a 10-point scale. Romanian exams include at least one starting point by rule, so a score of 0 is structurally impossible. The grade 1 is reserved exclusively for students caught cheating -- it functions less as a measure of performance and more as a formal sanction, a grade that signals conduct rather than knowledge.

• 6. Soviet Legacies and Post-Soviet Reforms

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  Lithuania changed its grading system to a 10-point scale in 1993. Before that change, Soviet Lithuania used a 5-point scale, and the shift marked a clean break with the inherited framework. The grade of 1 on the new scale carries a specific name in academic jargon: kuolas, the Lithuanian word for stake. It is awarded when no work has been submitted at all. Most teachers in practice use 2 as the lowest active grade and rarely assign a 1. In secondary schools, 4 is the minimum passing grade; in higher education, students must reach 5 to pass.

  Russia still uses the five-point scale that Soviet Lithuania abandoned. A 5 is excellent, a 4 is good, a 3 is satisfactory, and a 2 is unsatisfactory. The source notes that grading varies greatly not just from school to school and university to university, but even from teacher to teacher within the same institution, even in subjects like mathematics that lend themselves to objective marking. Qualifiers plus and minus are used to indicate intermediate positions: a 4-plus is better than a 4, but not quite a 5-minus.

  Bulgaria's grade scale runs from 2 to 6, where 6 is the highest. Schools use two competing formulas for converting raw scores. The first: multiply 6 by the number of correct answers and divide by the total questions. The second: add 2 to 4 times the fraction of correct answers. A student answering 7 out of 10 questions correctly earns a 4.2 under the first formula and a 4.8 under the second -- a difference that maps onto two different grade descriptors, Good and Very Good. Both formulas remain in active use. The grade 1, called Bad, is mostly obsolete and rarely given; some official electronic documents do not permit it to be entered.

• 7. When Systems Collide

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  Ireland's Leaving Certificate introduced its current points structure for the 2016-2017 cycle, replacing a system of lettered and numbered grades -- A1, A2, B1, B2 -- where each grade was separated by 5 percent and an A1 required a mark above 90. The new system uses H for higher level, O for ordinary level, and F for foundation level, with grades separated by 10 percent. A maximum of 6 subjects are counted toward university admission, with up to 100 points per subject. Students sitting the higher-level mathematics paper can earn an extra 25 points by achieving a grade above an H6. In practice, most students sit 7 or 8 subjects and count their best 6 results. In April 2025, Helen McEntee announced that the top four grade bands would each be distributed to 15 percent of candidates.

  Singapore operates multiple grading registers simultaneously. Primary school students in grades 1 through 6 earn Achievement Level grades from AL1 (90-100 percent) down to AL8 (0-19 percent). Secondary school students use letter-number combinations running from A1 to F9. The country's six autonomous universities each use distinct scales: the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore University of Social Sciences, and Singapore University of Technology and Design share a system where A-plus earns 5.0 points, while Singapore Management University uses a separate scale where A-plus earns 4.3. Students face academic termination if their cumulative GPA falls below 2.0 or 2.5 for two consecutive semesters.

  Japan moved in a different direction after the reorganization of national universities in 2004. The Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture encouraged both public and private universities to adopt a GPA system. Some schools, such as Kurume University, added a special grade covering the 90-to-100 range to mark excellence above the standard A band. The standard A in Japan spans 80-89, and a failing grade is generally called E, though some institutions use F -- a detail that matters when Japanese transcripts are read abroad by admissions offices trained on different conventions.