How to Convert the Jordanian Grading System to a US GPA (2026)

Jordanian transcripts usually carry recognizable descriptive bands, Excellent, Very Good, Good, down to a pass mark, which makes the system look easy to convert at a glance. The actual complication only shows up once you compare sources: the same university's own grading scale has genuinely changed structure over time, undergraduate and graduate bands at the same school don't always match, and three separate reference sources give three different US-letter or GPA mappings for what's supposedly the same University of Jordan transcript. Worth sorting out before an application depends on a single number from a single table.

The scale: percentage bands, but the boundaries moved over time

Jordan grades on a 0 to 100 percentage scale with descriptive bands layered on top, but a Simon Fraser University admissions reference documents a real discontinuity at the University of Jordan specifically. In 1992/93, the university's scale was percentage-based: Excellent at 85 to 100, Very Good at 76 to 84, Good at 68 to 75, Satisfactory at 60 to 67, and Fail below 60. By 1995/96, the same university had moved to a 4.0-point GPA-based scale instead: Excellent at 3.70 to 4.00, Very Good at 3.00 to 3.69, Good at 2.50 to 2.99, and Satisfactory at 2.00 to 2.49. These aren't the same scale measured two ways, they're two different systems with boundaries that don't line up, which matters if you're trying to interpret an older Jordanian transcript using a table built for a more recent one, or vice versa.

Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) adds a further wrinkle: its undergraduate and graduate programs use different bands entirely, according to a UC Irvine engineering GPA-calculator reference. Undergraduate: Excellent at 90 to 100 (a 4.0 GPA), Very Good at 80 to 89 (3.6), Good at 70 to 79 (3.0), and Fair at 60 to 69 (2.0). Graduate programs at the same university instead run Excellent at 88 to 100, Very Good at 80 to 88, Good at 75 to 80, and Pass at 70 to 75, different cutoffs than the undergraduate table at the identical institution. If you're converting a master's or PhD transcript from JUST, using the undergraduate table would give you the wrong answer.

A third, lower-passing-mark table that doesn't match either one

A University of Connecticut credit-transfer page gives yet another University-of-Jordan-specific mapping, and it's a notably coarser one: 80 to 100 maps to a US A, 70 to 79 to a B, 50 to 69 to a C, and 0 to 49 to an F. That's a much lower implied pass mark than either of the University of Jordan's own historical tables or JUST's undergraduate table, all of which cluster around 60 percent as the pass line. It's genuinely unclear whether UConn's table is meant as a grading-scale equivalence or a narrower credit-transfer rule specific to its own transfer-credit policy, so treat the 60 percent figure as the better-supported pass mark across sources, while flagging that at least one university's own published table implies something lower.

A separately circulated "Arab World" gradebook resource names University of Jordan, JUST, and Yarmouk University together under one shared five-band framework, Excellent at 90 to 100 through Fail below 60, but the same source is reportedly internally inconsistent about how many bands it actually describes elsewhere on the same page. Treat that specific resource as weak corroboration at best, not a primary source to cite directly.

Degree length and credit totals vary by program, not by one national figure

No single Ministry-mandated bachelor's length applies uniformly across Jordan. Sources describe 4 years as the norm, with medicine and surgery at 6 years, University of Jordan's own MD regulations setting a minimum of 6 academic years and a maximum of 8 to complete the degree, and engineering, pharmacy, and dentistry commonly running 5 years. Credit-hour totals follow the same pattern, set per program rather than nationally, University of Jordan's bachelor's in Land, Water and Environment runs 138 credit hours, while a theology bachelor's elsewhere runs 132, illustrating that even within the same country, total credits track the specific field more than a fixed national standard.

Authentication is a separate step from GPA conversion, and the chain has its own name confusion

Under Jordan's Regulation No. 54 of 2010, Jordan's Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research attests the authenticity of signatures and seals on Jordanian academic certificates and transcripts, a domestic verification step distinct from converting your grades into a US GPA. For documents headed abroad, one university admissions guide describes the chain running from notarization inside Jordan, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs attestation, to the Ministry of Higher Education's own attestation. Worth noting honestly: sources disagree on the accrediting body's exact current name, one calls it the Higher Education Accreditation Commission, another a Board of Higher Education Institutions Accreditation operating under the Ministry, and this wasn't resolved to a single confirmed name in this research, so don't assume either name is definitively the current, correct one without checking the Ministry's own current materials.

What an admissions office actually wants from you, versus a precise GPA

Most US and Canadian graduate programs that ask international applicants to self-report a GPA are really asking for a good-faith approximation, not a legally binding conversion, and many application portals leave room for you to explain your scale in a notes field rather than forcing a single number into a 4.0-scale box with no context. Where this gets riskier is a program that explicitly requires a third-party credential evaluation as part of the application itself, rather than a self-reported figure, since at that point the inconsistent public tables covered above stop being a safe shortcut. If a program's instructions are ambiguous about which it wants, it's worth emailing the admissions office directly to ask, rather than guessing and either under- or over-stating your record.

It's also worth distinguishing your overall cumulative figure from any honors or distinction language your university may print separately, since Jordanian transcripts sometimes carry a descriptive designation, Excellent or Very Good, for example, that doesn't automatically map to the same cutoff an admissions committee uses for its own honors terminology. If your transcript states a designation like this, name the actual percentage or GPA behind it in your application materials rather than assuming the English-language label alone will be read the same way a US reader would read "cum laude" or "with distinction."

Credential evaluation: the safer route when a specific GPA figure matters

WES explicitly covers Jordan through its iGPA Calculator, which the company describes as covering more than 135 countries generally, though no official WES-published band table specific to Jordan surfaced in this research, so don't treat any specific WES cutoff figure for Jordan cited elsewhere as confirmed without checking WES's own calculator directly. Sources also disagree on whether the iGPA Calculator carries a fee at all, one university page describes a nominal charge while WES's own help materials describe it as free, another discrepancy worth checking directly on wes.org rather than assuming either claim. Our WES vs. ECE vs. IQAS guide walks through which evaluator fits which destination country and application type if a formal Document-by-Document or Course-by-Course evaluation is what your target program actually requires.

Confirm specifics before you rely on them

The percentage-based scale with descriptive bands, the roughly 4-year standard bachelor's length with longer tracks for medicine, engineering, pharmacy, and dentistry, and the existence of a separate domestic attestation step are consistently reported across the sources checked for this guide. The exact percentage cutoffs behind each band, whether they're set nationally or per institution, the precise pass mark, and the accrediting body's current exact name are where sources genuinely disagree, so confirm your own institution's registrar-issued transcript key, or a formal NACES-member credential evaluation, before an application depends on any single figure cited here.

Finding a funded path once your transcript is sorted

Once you know how your transcript is likely to read to a foreign admissions committee, our guide to PhD and Masters funding for Jordanian students abroad covers Fulbright Jordan, Chevening eligibility, and the USAID funding picture in flux after 2025's aid cuts, and the professor-funded route sits alongside those named programs: GradScoutFunding searches professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing, and drafts a personalized first email grounded in their real recent paper for you to review and send yourself, it never sends anything automatically. The free tier gives you 2 credits with no card required, and paid credit packs are one-time purchases that never expire.

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