Netherlands Grading Scale

In short The Netherlands grading scale is Dutch 1–10: higher is better, the best attainable grade is 10, and the lowest passing grade is 5.5. The pass mark is 5.5, not 5 — the only major scale with a half-point threshold — and the top is as theoretical as the French one. A 9 is rare and a 10 nearly unheard of, so Dutch students routinely describe a 7 as a good result where the number alone reads as mediocre. 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 10 becomes German 1.0 and the pass mark of 5.5 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 "onvoldoende — 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.