Switzerland Grading Scale

In short The Switzerland grading scale is Swiss 1–6: higher is better, the best attainable grade is 6, and the lowest passing grade is 4. Switzerland uses the same numbers as Germany and runs them the opposite way: 6 is the best grade and 1 the worst, with 4 the pass mark in both. A Swiss 5 is a good grade and a German 5 is a fail. Nothing in the number tells you which country you are looking at, which makes this the single most dangerous pair of scales to confuse. 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 6 becomes German 1.0 and the pass mark of 4 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 "ungenügend — 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.