ECTS grading scale

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The ECTS grading scale was created to make grades from different European universities easier to compare and to help students transfer between institutions. It is used as an optional supplement to local grades, not as a replacement. On a student’s transcript, the host institution’s grade appears alongside an ECTS grade, and the receiving institution translates the ECTS grade into its own system.

Originally, ECTS encouraged using a single, shared distribution to show how grades were earned. This meant grouping passing students into five grades from A to E based on their percentile (top 10% get A, next 25% B, next 30% C, next 25% D, bottom 10% E), with FX and F used for failures. The idea was to reveal how a grade in one country compares to grades in another. But measuring and applying this across many countries proved difficult, and practices varied a lot.

In 2009, the unified scale was replaced by a simpler approach: institutions provide grade distribution tables for each degree program or group of programs. These ECTS grading tables show the actual percentage of students who receive each local grade. When included in transcripts, they help readers understand a student’s performance without extra calculations.

Using the ECTS table involves collecting data, choosing reference groups, and creating the table for each program. While the table improves transparency, it may still struggle to compare grades across national systems that use very few grade categories or have very different passing marks.