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Class GradeCALCULATOR

French grading system

In France, grades run from 20 (best) to 0, and 10 is the lowest pass.

Check your grades

Example courses. Change them to yours, or

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Weights are optional: leave them all empty to count every course the same. At school, enter each subject’s weight or coefficient; at university, each course’s ECTS credits.

Example · Weighted average of 3 courses

15.47

bien (good)

A pass. 10 is the lowest pass.

3 courses, weights adding up to 15. Your school’s or university’s own rules decide how the average is rounded.

0–1010–1212–1414–1616–20pass0.020.0 best

Grades: 0 to 20

Secondary schools, the baccalauréat and universities in France. The honours (mentions) apply to an overall average, such as the baccalauréat or a degree.

French grades, best first
GradeOn the transcriptMeaningPass?
16–20très bienvery goodPass
14–16biengoodPass
12–14assez bienfairly goodPass
10–12passablepass, no honoursPass
0–10failFail

French grades and a US GPA

This page gives no US equivalents for French grades: we found no table for them on Wikipedia or from an official source, and we do not make one up. A US university reads a foreign transcript itself or through the credential evaluation service it names, and its conversion is the one that counts.

Send your grades as they are, with the scale above. When a form asks for your average, give it on your own scale and say which scale it is: the converter’s average does exactly that, weighted by credits when you enter them.

What to know about grades in France

  • At university a 20 is almost never given, marks above 14 are very rare, and a mark above 12 usually puts a student in the top 10 to 20% of the class.
  • A baccalauréat average between 8 and 10 gives the right to oral resit exams to try to reach the pass mark of 10.
  • Optional subjects now count in the baccalauréat average with their own coefficient, like the other subjects, instead of adding bonus points, so the average cannot go above 20 out of 20.
  • In the preparatory classes for the grandes écoles, grading is so harsh that an average of 7 or 8 can be satisfactory and class rank matters more than the mark.
  • Before university, moving up a year is decided by the school's class council, so an average below 10 does not always mean repeating the year.

Sources: Wikipedia, Academic grading in France; Wikipedia, Grading systems by country (France); French Wikipedia, Baccalauréat en France.