Where does your academic performance actually rank?

A 1050 sits a little above the middle of the current 1600-point SAT, at the 55th user percentile. From there, 1200 puts you at roughly the 75th percentile, 1350 reaches the 89th, and 1500 sits at the 97th, with anything above 1550 landing in the top 1%. College Board publishes the full percentile distribution each year, and the curve has shifted since the 2016 redesign and again during the pandemic, so the cutoffs move slightly with every cohort. Selectivity matters more than the raw score. A 1400 is excellent for most state universities and merely competitive at the most selective private institutions, where the middle 50% of admitted students typically score between 1480 and 1560. Use the SAT score percentile calculator for your exact position in the most recent national distribution.

Entirely dependent on the tier you are aiming at. T14 law schools (Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Penn, Berkeley, Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Virginia, Michigan, Cornell, Georgetown) post 75th-percentile GPAs of 3.95 and above with 25th-percentile GPAs in the 3.80 to 3.85 range, paired with LSAT scores of 170+. Top-50 schools sit closer to a 3.6 to 3.8 median GPA with LSAT medians of 158 to 165, while regional schools admit from 3.2 upwards and let the LSAT do most of the work. Worth knowing that the median GPA at every ABA-accredited school has crept up by roughly 0.1 points over the last decade, which the Law School Admission Council publishes each cycle. See the GPA for law school calculator for tier-specific cutoffs and the GPA percentile tool for your overall position.

Around 30% of UK undergraduates received a First in 2022/23, on figures from HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency, against 16% in 2010 and just 7% in 1994. Upper Second classifications still take the largest share at roughly 48%, so Firsts and 2:1s together now cover almost 80% of all UK undergraduate awards. Where you studied changes the odds considerably. Russell Group universities award Firsts to a higher proportion of students than post-1992 universities do, and subject matters even more, with STEM and arts diverging by 10 to 15 percentage points in First rates. The Office for Students has flagged the whole trend as a sector concern. Our UK degree classification calculator shows the current distribution by year and institution type.

Above average everywhere and exceptional in some places. The national average undergraduate GPA in the US sits around 3.15, and that single figure hides enormous variation. At elite private universities the average can exceed 3.7 after decades of grade inflation, which puts a 3.5 below the median there, while at most state universities and community colleges the same 3.5 lands you in roughly the top 25% of students. Graduate programs treat 3.5 as the working floor for competitive applications, and employers tend to read anything above it as cum laude territory. Rigour matters as much as the number, since a 3.5 in mechanical engineering at a demanding university outranks a 3.9 in an easy program at the same institution. The what is a good GPA page breaks the thresholds down by use case, and average GPA by college shows institutional medians.

Approximately 30 points out of a possible 45, on data published by the International Baccalaureate Organisation. The pass mark is 24 points. Distribution is right-skewed, with relatively few candidates above 40, and since 2023 the IB no longer reports how many reach the maximum 45. Offers from UK Russell Group universities typically want 35 to 38, which is also competitive for selective US institutions. Predicted grades run 1 to 3 points higher than final results on average, a gap the IBO documents in its own assessment statistics reports. Our IB score percentile tool maps your total to the global candidate distribution.

Different things at different schools, which is the whole problem. American high schools and universities use a 4.0 unweighted scale, while weighted GPAs push honors and AP courses onto a 5.0 scale and lift the reported figure, and some universities run a 4.3 scale that treats A+ as its own grade. NCES transcript studies put the average high school GPA at 2.68 in 1990 and 3.00 in 2009, a climb often put down to grade inflation. International equivalencies wander further still, with a UK 2:1 mapping roughly to a 3.3 to 3.7 GPA and a French Bac mention of 'Très Bien' aligning with a top-decile US GPA. The GPA percentile calculator handles weighted, unweighted and international conversions and shows your position in the national distribution.

Between 1470 and 1570 covers the middle 50% of admitted students at Ivy League institutions, on the most recent Common Data Set filings from each university. That puts a 1500 below the median at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, and roughly at the median for Cornell, Brown and Dartmouth. The 25th-percentile cutoff has climbed 30 to 50 points across most Ivies in the last decade, partly because test-optional policies filter out the lower-scoring submissions before anyone counts them. A score above 1550 is top 1% nationally and competitive everywhere, though admissions read the whole application and a number on its own has never guaranteed anything. Our SAT score percentile calculator shows the most recent national distribution alongside selective-institution thresholds.

A great deal, and the effect compounds over time. The average US high school GPA rose from 2.68 in 1990 to 3.00 in 2009 in NCES transcript studies, UK First-class degrees went from 7% of awards in 1994 to 30% in 2022/23, and SAT scores recentered in 1995, then again with the 2016 redesign, then drifted up through the pandemic. So the percentile your grade represented in 2010 is not the percentile it represents today, even with an identical number on the transcript. That gap bites hardest at graduate school, professional licensure thresholds and employer screening, where the people deciding often anchor to the benchmarks they remember. Every percentile tool on this site runs on the most recent published distribution data, so the position you see reflects the current cohort.