It starts the same way every year. A Grade 12, or their mother, arrives at one of our offices with a matric report and one number they have worked out at home - “my APS is 36” - and the first thing we have to ask is: at which university?
APS stands for Admission Points Score. It is the score most South African universities use to decide whether you qualify for a particular degree, and the problem is that there is no such thing as one APS. UP and UJ take your best six subjects on the normal seven-point scale and ignore life orientation.
Wits counts seven, keeps LO on its own scale, and gives English and Math extra weight above 60%. UCT scores you out of 600. Stellenbosch does not use points at all - it averages six percentages. So a 36 can be a comfortable yes at one university and a no at the next.
Working this out by hand, for eight universities, for every student we assess, is slow and surprisingly easy to get wrong (LO alone is a trap). So we built ourselves a calculator. When assessing students, our education consultants and tutors enter a student's marks once and get eight scores back, each worked out on that university's own published rules, with the source document and the date we last checked it sitting next to each result. An Education Consultant, if you have not met one, is the senior person at Genius who runs a student's whole programme - the assessment, the tutor selection, the plan and the meetings with the school.
The calculator is now live on our website for anyone to use - students, parents, teachers, other tutors - with no sign-up and no charge.
What it does:
- Takes seven to nine registered NSC or IEB subjects (most learners have seven).
- Accepts marks the way they appear on a South African report.
- Handles second additional languages and the official immigrant-candidate language concession.
- Shows the rule and the source for each university, and the date we verified it. The current rules are checked for the 2027 intake, as of 1 September 2026, and we re-check every year.
- Keeps your marks in your browser tab. They are not sent to us, and no name or contact information is entered.
As far as we can tell, it is the most complete and easy-to-use APS calculator available for South African universities.
Keep in mind that it gives you a planning score, not an admission decision: each faculty adds its own subject requirements on top, so check the prospectus and the APS each university's programmes ask for before you apply. And it is built for NSC and IEB matrics - if you are doing Cambridge, IB or a GED, it is not for you.
“We built it because we needed it, and it turned out a lot of other people needed it too,” says Dean Cook, managing director of Genius Premium Tuition.
“So here it is. Use it, share it with your school, and if a university changes its rules before we notice, tell us.”
Grade 11 is a good time to start thinking about all of this. The calculator is at www.geniuspremiumtuition.com/aps-calculator/.
About Genius Premium Tuition
Genius Premium Tuition has provided one-to-one tuition to South African families since 1993 and has delivered more than 250,000 hours of lessons. Its tutors are on its own staff, selected and trained by the company, and every programme starts with an assessment of the student. Each family is assigned an Education Consultant, a senior educator who designs the programme, supervises the tutors and reports to the parents. The company works with families in Johannesburg, Cape Town and online.
