France Grading Scale

In short The France grading scale is French 0–20: higher is better, the best attainable grade is 20, and the lowest passing grade is 10. The top of the French scale is theoretical. Sixteen out of twenty is an excellent result, eighteen is exceptional, and a twenty is close to never awarded — there is a saying that twenty is for God and nineteen for the professor. Converting a French 14 as though it were a 70 per cent undersells it badly. Converting it into German terms is the one calculation here that is actually defined — the modified Bavarian formula, German grade = 1 + 3 × (best − yours) ÷ (best − pass). It is the method German universities use to place a foreign grade on their own 1–6 scale, and it pins both ends by construction: the best attainable grade always gives exactly 1.0 and the minimum pass exactly 4.0. So the top grade of 20 becomes German 1.0 and the pass mark of 10 becomes German 4.0, with everything between spread linearly. Any other conversion, including into a US GPA, is a convention that admissions offices print and no standards body publishes. And the number is only half the story: what travels between countries is the band name rather than the figure, because "insuffisant — fail" means the top of this scale whatever mark it happens to start at. Two systems can put their best students at 70 and at 80 and mean the same thing by it.