One French 13, four German grades

The KMK and the eight German universities read for this guide all convert a grade earned abroad with the same line of arithmetic, the modified Bavarian formula. The formula is the settled part. Which best grade goes into it, and what happens to the decimals that come out, are decided office by office, and on one French 13 those two decisions put the answer anywhere from 2.3 to 3.1.

The formula, read at source

The KMK's agreement on foreign school-leaving certificates, adopted on 15 March 1991 and amended on 12 September 2013, prints it as x = 1 + 3 × (Nmax − Nd) / (Nmax − Nmin), with the two corner values taken from the assessment proposals of Germany’s Central Office for Foreign Education. The universities that publish it define them plainly: Nmax is the best grade on the foreign scale, Nmin the lowest passing grade, Nd the grade being converted. The best grade lands on 1.0 and the pass line on 4.0, in a straight line between them. The Technical University of Munich sets out the same formula in words (July 2020), and Heidelberg University's conversion sheet (May 2023) points to the same resolution. The resolution also settles the decimals, for school certificates at least: the grade is “auf eine Stelle nach dem Komma bestimmt; es wird nicht gerundet”, set to one decimal place and not rounded.

A French 13, worked

The TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology lists French grades with a best grade of 18, not 20, and a pass line of 10. A 13 converts to 1 + 3 × (18 − 13) / (18 − 10) = 1 + 15/8 = 2.875, exactly. A German grade carries one decimal at most, so 2.875 has to be finished, and the rules German offices publish finish it four ways:

• Cut to one decimal: 2.8. The KMK rule. TUM's own converter truncates; Passau's School of Business has cut “(not rounded)” since the summer semester of 2017; the University of Erfurt's Staatswissenschaften faculty takes one decimal “ohne Rundung”.
• Rounded to one decimal: 2.9. Hochschule Osnabrück and LMU Munich's pharmacy admissions both say rounded.
• Nearest German grade step, a tie going to the better grade: 3.0. Leuphana University Lüneburg, for free movers; its own examples turn 2.5 into 2.3 and 1.15 into 1.0.
• Cut, then the better of the two neighbouring steps: 2.7. Passau's humanities and social-sciences faculties, for students who went abroad before the 2025/26 cohort.

Four rules, four grades, one exact value. On TUM's French values the four agree only at the ends of the scale, 18 and 10; at an 11 they spread from 3.3 to 3.7.

A published list that shows it cuts

TUM's School of CIT converts the Danish scale by numbering it first, 12 = 1, 10 = 2, 7 = 3 and so on, and its footnote lists 12 as 1.0, 10 as 1.7, 7 as 2.5, 4 as 3.2 and 2 as 4.0. On ranks 1 to 5 the formula gives 1.75 for a 10 and 3.25 for a 4. Cutting gives the printed 1.7 and 3.2; rounding would have printed 1.8 and 3.3. Typing the Danish numbers in directly, best 12 and pass 2, would give 1.6 and 3.4 instead.

The best grade is a decision too

The second choice comes before any arithmetic. TUM's list says outright that the best grade it uses “kann von der von der ausländischen Universität angegebenen Bestnote abweichen”: it can differ from the best grade the foreign university states. A Dutch 8 with a pass line of 6 converts to 2.5 against a best grade of 10 and to 2.0 against TUM's 9. Four German offices have capped the Dutch scale at 9: TUM's School of CIT; Passau's School of Business, whose caps until the winter semester 2025/26 also put UK marks at 80 and Irish marks at 75; Erfurt's Staatswissenschaften faculty, for the University of Groningen, on that university's “erwiesenen Vergabepraxis”, its proven grading practice; and Ruhr University Bochum's social-science tables of 2017.

French grades get the same treatment. TUM uses 16 for the grandes écoles, and Erfurt's international office recommends a best grade below 20. Cut to one decimal, the same French 13 is 2.5 against a best grade of 16, 2.8 against 18 and 3.1 against 20.

The rules move

These are dated choices. Passau's School of Business dropped its country caps for students going abroad from the winter semester 2025/26 and now takes both values from the host university's transcript. Passau's humanities and social-sciences faculties stopped moving results onto Passau's grade steps for the same cohort; their German pages say so, while the English page of each (humanities, social sciences), fetched the same day, October 6, 2026, still describes only the older rule. Bochum's social scientists put the whole field in two sentences in 2017: there is no official guidance from the EU or the DAAD on converting grades, and every university, often every faculty, writes its own recommendations.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you which office reads your grade, which best grade it uses or which rule it applies; the calculator shows all four readings for the values you enter, and its presets are one office's published values, not national ones. One discrepancy is held here rather than resolved, as of October 6, 2026: LMU's English pharmacy sheet defines Nmin as the “worst achievable grade”, while TUM, Heidelberg, Passau, Leuphana, Erfurt and Osnabrück all define it as the lowest passing grade. The calculator follows them.