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

Peruvian universities grade on a 0 to 20 scale, not the 0.0-5.0 or percentage systems more common elsewhere in Latin America, and that scale itself is close to uniform across the country's major institutions. Both Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Universidad del Pacífico state in their own grading documentation that the floor sits at 11, with 20 as the maximum. That consistency is actually the easy part. What trips up applicants is assuming a tidy 0-20 range means there's one simple formula, or one official table, that turns a Peruvian grade into a US GPA number a graduate admissions committee will recognize. There isn't, and the handful of tables that do exist for this exact scale don't agree with each other.

The scale itself is standard, the conversion isn't

If you studied at PUCP, Universidad del Pacífico, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, Universidad de San Martín de Porres, or most other Peruvian universities, your transcript almost certainly reports grades on a 0-20 scale, 20 being the highest grade and 11 the minimum a course has to clear to pass. Universidad Ricardo Palma's own equivalency table states the same floor slightly differently, putting the exact minimum passing grade at 10.5, which it treats as equivalent to 11, a decimal detail worth noting if your transcript shows unrounded grades rather than whole numbers. Your overall academic standing is tracked as a credit-weighted cumulative average, commonly labeled Promedio Ponderado Acumulado (PPA) on the transcript, calculated as the sum of each grade multiplied by its course credits, divided by total credits. That PPA is the number that functions as Peru's rough equivalent of a US cumulative GPA, still reported on the same 0-20 scale rather than converted to a 4.0-style quality-point figure. All of that is fairly consistent across institutions. What isn't consistent is how any given 0-20 number should read on a US admissions committee's 4.0 scale, because no single table governs that translation.

Three recognized tables, three different answers for the same grade

This is the part generic calculators gloss over: run the same Peruvian grade through three different, genuinely recognized references, and you can get three different US letter grades. InCred Evaluations, a credential-evaluation firm, publishes a Peru table that treats 15-20 as an A worth 4.0 quality points, 12-14.99 as a B, and 11-11.99 as a C, the lowest passing band. Simon Fraser University's graduate admissions office, in its own published guidance for Peruvian applicants, uses a different breakpoint entirely: 14-20 counts as "Excelente" (an A), 12-13.99 as "Muy bueno" (a B), and 11-11.99 as a bare pass. A third widely used commercial calculator, SmartCGPA, splits the top of the scale even further, mapping 18-20 to an A+/A, 16-17 to an A-, 14-15 to a B, and 12-13 to a C. Put a flat 14 through all three and you get an A under SFU's table, but only a B under InCred's and SmartCGPA's. Put a 15 through them and InCred and SFU both call it an A, while SmartCGPA still calls it a B. Neither disagreement is small, and neither direction is safe to assume without checking which specific table the evaluator reading your application actually uses.

There's no single official conversion table for Peru

It's worth being direct about something most generic grade-conversion calculators don't tell you: no Peruvian government body, university consortium, or single international standard publishes one authoritative Peru-to-US GPA table. WES is the credential-evaluation agency most US graduate programs name outright, and it does maintain a public grade-conversion knowledge base covering well over a hundred countries, but that resource does not surface a standalone, published Peru-specific breakdown the way it does for some other countries in this series. That leaves the field to references like InCred's, SFU's, and SmartCGPA's, each built independently, each disagreeing with the others on exactly where the A, B, and C bands start and end on the same 0-20 scale. A separate German academic exchange office (DHBW) converts the same Peruvian scale to Germany's 1.0-5.0 system using a straight linear formula instead, 20 maps to 1.0 and 11 maps to 4.0, which shows that even the basic approach, banded versus linear, isn't settled across the organizations that work with this scale. None of these tables is wrong exactly, because none of them claims to be the single official standard. That's exactly why a formal, agency-issued evaluation matters here: the agency's own table, not a calculator's, is what actually gets treated as authoritative by the university reading your application.

Don't confuse SUNEDU with a grade-conversion authority

SUNEDU, the Superintendencia Nacional de Educación Superior Universitaria, is Peru's national regulator for university-level higher education, created under University Law No. 30220 in 2014 and reorganized as an autonomous entity under Law 31520 in 2022. Its actual functions are licensing universities, supervising institutional quality, and maintaining the Registro Nacional de Grados y Títulos, the national registry that confirms a specific academic degree was properly conferred by a licensed institution. That registry is genuinely useful if an admissions office wants to verify that your Peruvian degree is real and from a licensed university, and it's worth knowing it exists for that reason. What it isn't is a source for converting your grades, SUNEDU doesn't publish a GPA-equivalency table or a letter- grade mapping, and confirming your degree's registration there tells an admissions reader nothing about what your individual course grades or PPA equal on a 4.0 scale. Keep the two purposes separate: degree verification is SUNEDU's job, grade conversion is a credential evaluator's.

Your PPA is already credit-weighted, don't recompute it unweighted

Peru's cumulative academic average, the Promedio Ponderado Acumulado, is weighted by each course's credit value, not a flat average of every grade you've ever received. A course worth more créditos contributes proportionally more to your PPA than a lighter one, and your university's own transcript or academic portal already runs that calculation for you. A generic online calculator that simply averages every listed grade with equal weight, ignoring individual course credit values, can produce a different cumulative figure than the one your actual transcript reports, and a different one again from what a formal evaluator recalculates from your official record. If you're sanity-checking a converted number before a formal evaluation comes back, use the PPA your university already states rather than recomputing an unweighted average from your individual course grades.

Whether you actually need a formal evaluation

This depends on the specific program, and it's worth confirming directly rather than assuming. Some US graduate programs require a sealed, course-by-course credential evaluation from a NACES-member agency, most commonly WES or ECE, before they'll even review an international application. Others accept a self-reported conversion alongside your original Peruvian transcript, to be formally verified only after an admission offer. Some programs evaluate your original 0-20 transcript directly without requiring any US-scale conversion at all. Our comparison of WES, ECE, and IQAS covers how each evaluator actually works and which one a given program is more likely to require, and our guide to converting the Colombian grading system shows the same pattern, no single official table, evaluator tables that disagree, playing out on a different Latin American grading scale.

If the converted number still undersells a strong record

Even a correctly band-based conversion can leave a genuinely strong Peruvian transcript looking flatter than it should, particularly since grades above roughly 17-18 are intentionally rare at many Peruvian universities and most of the real work of distinguishing students happens in the 12-16 range, right where the recognized tables disagree most. Where that happens, two things are worth doing rather than accepting the number silently. First, check whether your target program looks at individual course grades in subjects directly relevant to the research you want to do, alongside or instead of a single aggregate GPA figure, since that's often what a specific professor actually cares about. Second, a brief, factual note on your application, your transcript uses Peru's standard 0-20 scale with 11 as the pass mark, and your strongest grades sit near the top of that range, gives an admissions reader useful context without reading as an excuse.

A converted GPA is also only one input into whether a specific professor decides to personally fund your research off their own grant, and it's rarely the deciding one. Our piece on why research fit matters more than GPA covers why a professor evaluating you for their own lab is typically reading your actual coursework, research experience, and fit with their current work far more closely than a single converted number on an admissions form. That's exactly why a well-targeted cold email to a specific professor is worth running in parallel with the formal application and its credential evaluation, not instead of it. GradScoutFunding searches professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing, and drafts a personalized outreach email grounded in one of their real recent papers, so a professor is evaluating your actual research background directly rather than only a converted GPA figure. Every draft is yours to review and send. Our guide to PhD funding for Peruvian students abroad covers the scholarship and funding routes alongside this one. The free tier gives you 100 credits with no card required, and paid credit packs are one-time purchases that never expire.

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