Grade Converter

There is no official conversion

This is the first thing worth saying, and most tools in this category do not say it: no authority publishes an official mapping between a UK degree classification and a US GPA. Every conversion in circulation is a convention. Universities publish their own, they disagree with each other, and none of them binds anyone else.

So a tool that answers “a 2:1 is a 3.5” is telling you something it cannot know. What is true is that a 2:1 is usually treated as somewhere between 3.3 and 3.7, and where you sit in the 60–69 band moves it. That range is the honest answer, and it is more useful than a false decimal, because it tells you when you are near a line that matters.

The mistake that costs people places

Converting the raw percentage instead of the classification.

UK marking is not distributed like US marking. In a British university, 70% is a First — the top classification, awarded to a minority of a cohort. Marks above 80 are rare and above 90 almost unheard of, because the scale is not designed to be used at the top. In a US course, 70% is a C.

A student who writes “70%” on an application to a US institution, with no explanation of the system, has just described a first-class degree as average work. It happens constantly. Report the classification, and let the percentage support it rather than replace it.

What admissions offices actually do

Mostly, they ignore your conversion and do their own.

Competitive programmes typically recalculate from the transcript itself, often through a credential evaluation service that specialises in exactly this. They have seen more UK transcripts than you have, and they know what a 68 from a British department means.

The practical consequence: send the transcript, and do not lead with a converted number. Use a conversion to understand roughly where you stand and to decide where to apply. Do not use one to fill in a box on a form unless the form asks for it, and if it does, say which convention you used.

ECTS grades are a different kind of thing

Worth understanding, because the comparison in the table above is the loosest of the three.

ECTS grades are relative, not absolute. A is the top 10% of the cohort, B the next 25%, C the next 30%, D the next 25% and E the last 10%. They describe your position among the people who took the course, not a standard you met.

That makes them fundamentally different from a percentage, which is absolute. A hard-marking department can produce a cohort where an ECTS A corresponds to 68%, and an easy one where it corresponds to 82%. Any mapping from ECTS to a percentage is therefore an average across situations that genuinely differ.

Why boundaries matter more than conversions

If your mark is within two marks of a classification boundary, this tool says so before it says anything else.

That is because the boundary is a real, discontinuous thing in a way the conversion is not. Sixty-nine and seventy are one mark apart and a classification apart. A great many postgraduate courses and graduate schemes filter on “2:1 or above” as a hard threshold. No GPA estimate captures that, and no admissions office cares that 69.4 rounds up on your calculator.

If you are near a boundary with assessments still to come, the final grade calculator will tell you what you need on what is left, and the GPA calculator shows which modules are actually moving your average.

A note on the ranges overlapping

You may notice the GPA ranges in the table touch at the edges — a First is 3.7–4.0 and a 2:1 is 3.3–3.7. That is not sloppiness. Published equivalency guidance genuinely disagrees about where the line falls, and some institutions place a high 2:1 above a bare First from a different university.

Smoothing that into clean, non-overlapping bands would look tidier and be less true.

What to do with the answer

Three things this is genuinely good for: working out whether you meet a stated requirement, deciding which institutions are realistic before you spend application fees, and explaining your degree to someone who has never seen a British transcript.

One thing it is not good for: arguing with an admissions decision. If they used a different convention from this one, they are not wrong — theirs is the one that counts.