For example in poland we generally use 6-1 with 6 being the highest mark you can get (but it’s not really common nor used out of primary school and only bigger exams used it) and 1 being the lowest. If you go to an uni, however, you are graded on a scale 5-2 (so if you get 2, you don’t pass, unlike in lower schools) which was also the common scale before (I think before the reform that introduced middle schools which was about 30 years ago?).
So, what’s it like in your country?
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1-6 in elementary and middle school, 15-0 in high school/ university. 1 and 15 being the highest possible marks. While 1 is common, 15 is less likely, especially in university. (Germany)
1-5 (with 5 being highest grade and 1 lowest) until higher education, there grades are rated 5-10 (with 10 highest grade and 5 lowest).
1-10 with 10 highest, also use decimals. 5.5 or 6 is often what you need to pass. Sometimes they also use – or +, so 7+ is 7.2 and 7- is 6.8
In the first three years there are only “opisne ocene” (descriptive grades); which is basically just: The pupil can do <insert here>, the pupil can’t do <insert here>.
From there on, until university, it goes from 5 down to 1 (1 is fail). Usually it’s 90% for 5, 80%/75% for 4, 65%/60% for 3 and 50%/45% for 2.
In university it’s from 10 down to 1 (5 or less being fail) and each grade is 10% (90% is 10, 80% is 9, 70% is 8…)
When I went to school it was 1 best 4 passing 6 worst until I got to the three final years of high school when it turned into 15 best 5 passing 0 worst but at the end it got converted back into a 1-4-6 average grade, in vocational school for my apprenticeship it was 1-4-6 again except for the finals when it was 100-50-0 (basically a percentage), and this I think is also the scoring used for colleges and universities.
Finnish schools use a grading system of 4-10 until the 9th grade (10 is best and 4 is failed) after that Lukio (Gymnasium) uses the same grades for normal exams and [latin grades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriculation_exam_(Finland)#Scoring) for the final matriculation exams (Ylioppilastutkinto). Ammattikoulu (Vocational school) uses grades 1-3 where 3 is best and 1 worst. Yliopisto and Ammattikorkeakoulu (universities and universities of applied sciences) use a grading of 1-5 where 5 is best and 1 worst.
First 4 years of elementary school are with descriptive words. After that the scale goes 4-10, with 4 being failing grade.
I think it comes from 40% correct answers or less being a failing result from tests.
For tests, the grades go in increments of 1/4, so grades between 8 and 9 are 8+, 8 1/2 and 9-. But these aren’t used as grades for courses.
In university, this changes to a 0-5 scale, with 0 being a failing grade
A-E with A being the highest and E being the lowest, along with F for a failing grade. Afaik there also used to be a 1-5 numbering system, which was then replaced with the G-VG-MVG system in 1994. We switched to the current system in 2011.
In the elementary, middle and high school we use a 1-10 system with 6 being the minimum required to pass, but usually teachers starts from 2 onwards (ex. if you leave a test completely blank with your name only you most likely get a 2). Usually quarters are used for in between marks usually in this form: 7, 7+, 7 1/2, 7/8, 8 (counted as 7, 7.25, 7.5, 7.75, 8 in order to calculate your average grade). The grade after finishing high school is on a 100 scale, with 60 being minimum required.
In university it’s quite similar but on a 30 basis instead of 10, so 18 is minimum required and there aren’t decimals. The graduation “scoring” is on a 110 scale
1-8 with 1 being the highest. Then there’s a letter placed in front to determine what level the subject is so H for Higher level, O for ordinary level and F for foundation level. So a H1 is the highest grade. Most students would do their subjects at higher level except for English, Irish and maths where usually at least one is done at ordinary level. Foundation level is usually just for people with learning disabilities
We don’t have any exams in primary school, at least nothing formal or official. You don’t encounter any state exams until you’re 15 at the Junior Cert.
Teachers usually use A, B, C, D, E, F grading with +/- too sometimes. Percentages are also commonly used. This system (or an extended version) was used to also be used for state exams until relatively recently:
85 or over – A
70 but less than 85 – B
55 but less than 70 – C
40 but less than 55 – D
25 but less than 40 – E
10 but less than 25 – F
Less than 10 – No grade (NG)
Primary teachers often graded out of 20. Others used %.
——
For the Junior Certificate, at 15 there’s now a different system:
90 or over – Distinction
75 but less than 90 – Higher Merit
55 but less than 75 – Merit
40 but less than 55 – Achieved
20 but less than 40 – Partially Achieved
Less than 20 – Not Graded
—-
The Leaving Certificate exams done at the end of secondary school has a much more complicated grading system:
From H1 to H8 (higher level)
or O1 to O8 (ordinary level) or
F1 to F8 (Foundation Level)
And you’ve got “distinction”, “Merrit” and “Pass” on Leaving Cert Vocational.
University marking here varies a bit but the traditional approach is quite harsh.
Getting 1st class honours is historically quite difficult and getting 70% can be considered impressive in some contexts, which can really shock American students when they get 71% in an essay or something and it’s seen as “good.” It’s just not “exceptional.” High grades are usually seen as only being awarded for something really exceptional and if they become too common you’ll have freaking out about grade inflation.
——-
1st Class Honours “1H” “a first”
2nd Class Honours Grade 1 “a two one” (2:1)
2nd Class Honours Grade 2 “a two two” (2:2)
3rd Class Honours
Pass
Pass by compensation
You usually cannot do a masters degree or postgraduate degrees without a “2:1” or sometimes a “2:2” might be accepted, with other experience etc.
https://www.ucc.ie/en/media/support/skillscentre/pdfx27sampbookmarks/NUIMarksBands.pdf
Then you’ve a national qualifications framework to connect them all up:
https://www.qqi.ie/what-we-do/the-qualifications-system/national-framework-of-qualifications
In tertiary education 0-20 is the norm. It’s probably possible to get a zero if you try hard enough but a zero is most often a punishment for cheating. A 20 is insanely hard to achieve and a 16 or 17 is already very good.
In primary and secondary, the highest grade (usually) varies per test. Each question is assigned a specific number of points and the sum of those points is the highest obtainable grade for that test. At the end of the trimester a weighted average is calculated, with larger tests being weighed more heavily than smaller tests. Fifty percent is the passing grade.
0-10 with 0 being the lowest and 10 the highest, and you need a 5 to pass. Sometimes the grades are in numbers sometimes in the following words that correspond to the numbers: From 0 to 4 is an insuficiente(not enough), a 5 is a suficiente (enough), a 6 a bien(good), from 7 to 8 is notable (remarkable), and from 9 to 10 sobresaliente(outstanding).
1-6 with 1 meaning “did literally nothing”, “did not show up” or “cheated” and 6 meaning “perfection” or “by far surpassed the expectations” (I had some teachers that would never give a 6, because nothing you do is ever perfect. They’d give you a 5.99, but not a 6). 4 is the lowest passing grade.
Decimals are also used, but usually rounded to the closest 0.5 at the end of the year, so while you might have a 4.34 in one single exam, at the end of the year your average is calculated and then rounded to the closest multiple of 0.5.
In Hungary, it’s 1-5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest (passing grade is 2 but on most tests, you need to score at least 40-50% to get a 2). In Austria, it’s the exact same concept but the other way around, with 5 being the lowest and 1 the highest grade.
1-10 in elementary, middle, high school. 6 is passing grade, 10 is max.
We used to have “insufficient, sufficient, good, optimal” in elementary school but they changed it to numbers.
1-100 for the maturity exam at the end of high school. The grade is the sum of different tests and an amount comes from your average in the last years of high school.
1-30 in university, 18 is the passing grade. 30 cum laude is possible.
1-110 on your bachelor’s or master’s degree. The grade comes from the average of your university exams plus something for your thesis.
0-10. 5 is the minimum to pass in most of school but a 6 is required in university courses such as medicine, law, psychology, engineering, etc. Some primary schools use a scale going “Insufficient, sufficient, good, great” to describe things like reading that can’t be easily graded with a numerical scale.
For school it’s A-C being a pass, D being a “good” fail (within 10% of the pass mark usually), “no award” being an out and out fail. Some of the exams used to be 1-7, with 1 being the best, 6 being the worst and 7 being a fail, although in that system most exams were set in such a way that you could only get 1/2/7, 3/4/7, 5/6/7, and generally you sat two levels (so in practise you could get from 1-4 or 3-6, or a 7).
Unis seem to all have their own systems for course work but all use the 1st, 2:1, 2:2 and 3rd system used elsewhere in the UK (and maybe Ireland).
Until 9th grade, 1-5 with 1-2 being failing grades and the following correspondence to percentages:
5: 90-100
4: 70-89
3: 50-69
2: 20-49
1: 0-19
From 10th grade onwards, including University, 0-20 with 0-9 being failing grades and tests/exams being graded on the same scale with 1 decimal digit.
In primary and secondary schools it’s 1-5, with 1 being the highest and 5 the lowest, failing. If your final grade of any subject at the end of the year is a 5, you have to pass a “repairing” exam during the summer vacation and if you fail, you have to repeat the whole school year with the younger kids.
At the university the grades are A, B, C, D, E, FX, with FX meaning failing.
1-6, 6 being the highest, 4 being required for a pass. There are usually half-notes too, some teachers also do quarter notes or round to the first decimal. In the final grade sheet at the end of the year, they final average is rounded to half notes.
The formula is usually (points made : points possible) * 5 +1.
So effectively, it’s a scale from 0 to 5, shifted one up, with every grade representing 20 %.
In primary school (1st to 7th grade) we have no grading system and no formal assessment at all. From 8th grade to 13th grade we use the 1-6 scale, where 1 is fail and 6 is the best.
It’s generally very hard to fail (e.g. needing to get less than ca. 15% correct on a math test), but also quite hard to get a 6 (e.g. 96-97% correct). We also operate with nuances like + and – (but no 6+ or 1-), but only as indicators throughout the school year and not for the final grade.
Edit: Universities use the A-F scale, where A-E is passed and F is fail. But depending on the subject, it’s generally much harder to pass (percentage wise) at university than it is in high school.
1 – 10, with 10 being the highest grade, and 5 being the lowest passing grade.
Before university – since 1 is reserved for cheating, 2 is the de facto lowest grade. The final grade in a subject is an avg of the grades you get along the semester.
You cannnot pass into the next year if you don’t have passing grades in all subjects. You can retake the final exam during the summer, but, if you fail once again, you repeat the year.
University – the final grade in a subject is a sum of the points you get along the semester. Once again, you can retake the final exam during the summer.
If you fail, they write it down as a 4 (in order to compute the avg of your grades that year, for scholarship purposes and such). If you fail, you can pass into the next year, but you still need to pass it eventually, in order to graduate.
If you have no failed subjects, you are allowed to retake exams during the summer, in order to get a higher grade. You can, technically, get a lower grade than the first one, but professors customarily keep the highest of the two.
Elementary school usually uses qualitative grades such as “Good” or “Very good”, with Very Good being the highes and “Very unfulfilling” being the lowest in the school I attended.
Middle school uses a 1-5 grading, with 5 being the highest and below 3 being a no pass. You only fail the school year if you get no passes on at least 3 subjects IIRC.
High school uses a 0-20 gragin, with 10 being a no pass, and you have to repeat every subject where you don’t get a pass.
College is the same as high scool.
-3 to 12
-3: Failing grade / didn’t do the assignment
0: Doesn’t express that they understood the subject properly
02: minimum passing grade, led to a saying among bad students; “anything past 02 is wasted work”
4: Better than 02, but definite room for improvement
7: the average, not good, not bad either
10: Great but some room for improvement
12: Perfect
For England- as another poster has pointed out, other countries within the UK have their own systems:
Most schools in the state system (I do not have any knowledge of whether the private sector does similarly) report attainment in terms of the [national curriculum framework](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-framework-for-key-stages-1-to-4/the-national-curriculum-in-england-framework-for-key-stages-1-to-4), which specifies what children are expected to achieve at each stage of their education. Throughout most of primary education (4- 11 years) ‘grading’ is generally indicating whether children are working below, at or above the expected level for their age.
In the final year of primary education, children sit national tests called Key Stage 2 SATs. The expected level of attainment here is a scaled score of 100. Throughout secondary education (11-16), grades are generally expressed in terms of what would be achieved if the child was being assessed for a GCSE exam, which are sat by (almost) all children at 16. The lowest possible grade is a 1 (equivalent to the old style G grade) and the highest a 9 (higher than the old style A* grade): the expectation for children sitting GCSEs is to achieve grade 4-5. Although grades 1-3 are regarded as ‘passes’, they are not really accepted as such in practice, and most institutions of further and higher education regard anything below a 4 as a fail.
At A Level (2 year programme generally undertaken between 16 and 18, the route most likely to be used for university), as far as I know the grades are expressed as A* to E.
At uni, degree classifications go from a First down to a pass degree- 1st, 2:1, 2:2, 3rd, pass.
It is as clear as mud 🙂
Belgium’s been answered so I guess I’ll answer for the motherland.
Back home, primary school was on a 5-point scale: A, B, C, D and R – A was the best, and R was a fail. (“R” stood for “Remedial”.) Report cards were sent out twice/semester, and you had to have your parent sign it and you brought it back. (This is, by the way, where the stereotype comes in about kids forging their parents’ signatures! I learned how to do my mom’s hahaha.)
In middle school and high school you just had percentages. In Class A, you could have 3 tests – 30/30/40 – with maybe 50 points available on each test, but in Class B you could maybe have 4 smaller tests and a big exam – 15/15/15/15/40. It was kinda #yolo, as long as the teacher gave you a score out of 100 at the end haha.
University for me was letter grades: A+, A, B+, B, C+, C, D+, D, E, and F. You needed minimum D to pass, E and F were fails, but E would qualify you for an exam re-sit or extra assignments to bring you up to a D or more. Other Canadian universities used percentages.
What was unique about my university was our system to calculate your GPA, which is a reflection of your overall “score” in university. Most often, particularly in the US, it’s expressed as a number out of 4.00.
My university expressed it out of 9.00 for some long mathematical reason that nobody’s interested in haha. I think I finished my degree with a GPA of somewhere around 7.50/9.00, so about 3.33/4.00. (Canadians put almost no emphasis on their GPA, it’s purely a statistical number for us, and has little-to-no bearing on employment or other life factors, like in the US.)
In Italy grades are from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest and 6 the pass, during the whole school period. In universities, instead, grades from 0 to 30 are used, with 18 being the pass and 30 the highest. Together with a 30 you can also get a “Lode” which is no more than a mention of honour.
In 1st-2nd grade there are no grades. In 3rd-4th we have A-C (maybe there’s also a D? I’m not sure), with A being the highest grade you can get. Then, in 5th-6th grade we have 1-10 with 10 being the highest. I don’t think there are really “failing grades” at this point, because no matter how low your grade is you won’t repeat the year in elementary school.
In middle school and high school it’s 1-20 with 20 being the highest grade. If your overall score is below 10 you must repeat the year.
Then, in university it’s 1-10 again with 5-10 being passing grades.
Idk where u went to school in Poland but 1-6 basis is used from primary school till end of highschool everywhere. Not uncommon at all to use 6, just very hard to aquire since u need 98% (or 97/96, varies on school) to get it. Maybe u just meant that (idk).
Also usually 2=51%, which is the minimum to pass. Later on in university u need at least 60% to pass, but again it varies from uni to uni.
0 to 20.
You usually need 10 to pass.
For major exams like baccalauréat, you can get a specific mention depending on the grade : 12 is “good enough”, 14 “good”, 16 “very good”, 18 gets “congratulations from the jury”.
Also, you can’t get a 20 in a subject that doesn’t have exact answers. So it’s possible in math, physics or a language vocabulary test for example, but impossible when writing a French, philosophy or language essay… At most you’ll get 19 and even that is extremely rare.
We use a range where the middle is barely passing, above is pass and below is fail.
**Primary and Secondary school**
You get graded 0-10 with 5 being barely passing and 4 and below meaning failed.
On final reports you might get it on a 0-100 scale with anything under 50 being considered a fail.
**higher education (college/uni)**
Here you’re usually graded 0-20 in with anything under 10 being considered a fail. However if your other grades are decent you might be “deliberated”, meaning the fail is tolerated because you score well on other work and you can still get your degree.
10 is considered a pass, but you might get remarks to reconsider your study. Only after 12 you’ll be considered “adequate”. Over 14 is considered “with honors” (over 16 is highest honors and 18 is high honours with felicitations. Higher than this is virtually unattainable, especially in oral examinations)
In primary school and some secondary schools (usually the ones teaching trades) discrete 1-5 with 1 being the best and 5 the worst. Some teachers use + and -, eg. 2- is almost a 3 and 2+ is almost a 1.
In gymnazium secondary schools, we were graded by percentages, fitting into the 1-5 categories. Eg. Anything lower than 60% is a 5 => fail. Maturita (state final exam for secondary school, same as A-levels) is graded on the 1-5 scale.
At uni, most exams were points based, every exam(zkouška or klasifikovaný zápočet) had a different grading scale and there were some pass/fail exams (zápočet). The state final uni exams are word graded with 4 categories, excellent – very good- good – fail
(UK-based) I did IBMYP and IB in secondary school, and I remember assignments being graded from 0-8 (0, 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, or 7-8). A 3-4 is a pass, and 8’s were very, very rarely awarded. 7 was an excellent mark. I may be misremembering but I think they dropped 8 entirely at some point? I go to a Scottish uni now and we get grades from 0-20; you pretty much only get 0 if you don’t submit the assignment, and 20’s are rare but entirely possible, depending on the subject and the assignment. There are exceptions, though; one of my subjects this semester is graded pass/fail instead of 0-20.