United Kingdom Grading Scale

In short The United Kingdom grading scale is UK percentage: higher is better, the best attainable grade is 100, and the lowest passing grade is 40. British marking is compressed at the top and this is the mistake foreigners make most often. Seventy per cent is a First — the highest classification there is — and marks above eighty are rare enough that many departments effectively cap at the high seventies. Reading a UK 70 as an American 70 turns the best degree in the country into a C. 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 100 becomes German 1.0 and the pass mark of 40 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 "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.