The Shock of the GEMSAS Audit
Every year, students are shocked when their official GEMSAS GPA is significantly lower than the GPA printed on their university transcript.
Australian universities all use different grading scales. At Monash University, an 80% is a High Distinction (HD). At the University of Sydney, an 85% is an HD.
To make medical admissions fair across the country, GEMSAS ignores your university's internal GPA system entirely. They take your raw percentage grades and run them through their own strict conversion tables.
How the Conversion Works
GEMSAS assigns a specific GPA value to a range of percentages. For many universities (refer to the GEMSAS Admissions Guide for exact tables):
The 'Pass/Fail' Danger
During COVID-19, many universities allowed students to take subjects as "Satisfactory / Ungraded Pass" so it wouldn't hurt their GPA.
How does GEMSAS handle this? Generally, an Ungraded Pass is completely excluded from your GPA calculation. It does not help you, and it does not hurt you.
However, if you fail a subject (Ungraded Fail), GEMSAS converts that into a GPA of 0.0. This will catastrophically destroy your average.
The Honors Year Loophole
If your undergraduate GPA is terrible (e.g., a 5.0), you are locked out of medicine. But there is a loophole: The Honours Year.
If you complete a 1-year standalone Honours degree and achieve First Class Honours (H1), many GEMSAS universities will award you a perfect 7.0 GPA for that entire year. Because GEMSAS weights your final year heavily (x3), a perfect Honours year can mathematically resurrect a dead undergraduate GPA, pulling it from a 5.0 up to a competitive 6.5.
Do not calculate this by hand. The math is too critical to get wrong. Use our GEMSAS GPA Calculator to input your percentage marks and apply the exact x1, x2, x3 weighting automatically.
Let the Algorithm Do It
Stop guessing. Input your exact percentage grades and let our calculator apply the GEMSAS rules.
Calculate GEMSAS GPA