Australia GPA
& grading scale
Quick answer: There is no single Australian grading scale. Across 27 universities we checked against their own published policies, 16 start High Distinction at 85% and 9 start it at 80% — so the same mark can be a Distinction at one university and a High Distinction at another. GPA scales differ too: 21 use a 7-point scale, 5 use 4-point, and some universities publish a WAM (a percentage average) instead of a GPA.
Australia → US GPA
There is no single Australian grading scale
Most guides print one table — HD 85–100, D 75–84, Credit 65–74, Pass 50–64 — and present it as the Australian system. It is not. Band cut-offs, GPA scales and even which measure a university reports all vary by institution. The table below is built from the published grading policy of each of the 27 universities we have verified directly.
High Distinction starts at 80% at 9 universities and 85% at 16
A mark of 82 is a High Distinction at Australian National University, Federation University Australia, Monash University and RMIT University — and only a Distinction at Sydney, UNSW, QUT, Griffith and the other 85% universities. The split correlates loosely with state, but it is an institutional choice, not a state rule: the University of Notre Dame Australia runs an 80% threshold at its Sydney campus, and Australian Catholic University operates across four jurisdictions under one set of Academic Regulations.
GPA scales are not all out of 7
21 of the universities checked use a 7-point GPA. 5 use a 4-point GPA: Bond University, Monash University, RMIT University, Swinburne University of Technology and University of Notre Dame Australia. The scale and the band thresholds vary independently — Bond is 4-point with an 85% HD threshold, while Monash and RMIT are 4-point with an 80% threshold, so the same GPA of 3.0 represents different performance at each. Curtin University uses neither: it reports a Course Weighted Average (CWA), a percentage, and states plainly that it “does not use or calculate a Grade Point Average”.
Grade bands by university
Verified against each university’s own published grading policy or official grading page. Universities whose band tables we have not yet confirmed from a primary source are deliberately omitted rather than estimated.
| University | State | Top grade | Main measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curtin University | WA | no letter grades (numeric 5–10 by decile) | CWA (no GPA) |
| Adelaide University | SA | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Avondale University | NSW | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Bond University | QLD | HD from 85% | 4-point GPA |
| Charles Darwin University | NT | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Charles Sturt University | NSW | HD from 85% | GPA |
| Flinders University | SA | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Griffith University | QLD | 7 from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| James Cook University | QLD | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Queensland University of Technology | QLD | 7 from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Southern Cross University | NSW | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| Torrens University Australia | SA | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| UNSW Sydney | NSW | HD from 85% | WAM |
| University of New England | NSW | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| University of Sydney | NSW | HD from 85% | WAM |
| University of Technology Sydney | NSW | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| University of the Sunshine Coast | QLD | HD from 85% | 7-point GPA |
| CQUniversity | QLD | HD from 84.5% | 7-point GPA |
| Australian National University | ACT | HD from 80% | GPA |
| Federation University Australia | VIC | HD from 80% | 7-point GPA |
| Monash University | VIC | HD from 80% | WAM · 4-point GPA |
| RMIT University | VIC | HD from 80% | 4-point GPA |
| University of Melbourne | VIC | H1 from 80% | WAM |
| University of Notre Dame Australia | WA | HD from 80% | 4-point GPA |
| University of Tasmania | TAS | HD from 80% | 7-point GPA |
| University of Western Australia | WA | HD from 80% | WAM · 7-point GPA |
| Victoria University | VIC | HD from 80% | 7-point GPA |
Why we do not publish a GPA→percentage conversion
An Australian GPA cannot be converted back to a percentage. A grade band discards the mark that produced it. Macquarie University publishes the clearest demonstration of this in its own material: two students, one with marks of 58, 74, 64, 59, 64, 74, 73 and 56, the other with 52, 70, 61, 53, 62, 71, 72 and 50. Both have a GPA of 4.375. Their WAMs are 65.25 and 61.375.
Bond University makes the same point about international equivalency on its own grades page: “There is no single guaranteed equivalency between Australian grades and overseas grading systems. Published equivalency tables should be treated as general guidance only, not as official outcomes.” If you need an official equivalence for an application, a credential evaluation (WES, ECE, ICES) is the only authoritative route.
Where these figures come from
Every band on this page is read from the university’s own grading policy or official grading page — not from a third-party table. Each university’s source is linked beside it in the full directory, and the individual university pages list every document we read and every one we identified but could not obtain.
Universities whose bands we have not confirmed from a primary source are deliberately omitted from the comparison above rather than estimated.
What a WAM is, and who uses one
A Weighted Average Mark is a credit-weighted average of your actual percentage marks. 9 of the universities checked report a WAM as their primary measure — La Trobe University, Macquarie University, Monash University, UNSW Sydney, University of Melbourne, University of Newcastle, University of Sydney, University of Western Australia and University of Wollongong — and several others report both a WAM and a GPA. Because a WAM is already a percentage, there is nothing to convert.