TL;DR: There is no national dean's list rule in the Philippines. CHED's Manual of Regulations for Private Higher Education deals with graduation honors, and even there tells each school to set its own criteria. Term honors are entirely institutional. The published cutoffs: Ateneo First Honors at semestral QPI 3.70, Second Honors 3.35, minimum 15 academic units. De La Salle First Honors at term GPA 3.400, Second Honors 3.000–3.399, minimum 12 academic units, nothing below 2.0. UST Faculty of Arts and Letters at GWA 1.750 or better with no failure and no incomplete, including PE and NSTP. Mapúa at a term weighted average of 1.75 to 1.00 with a running average of 2.00 to 1.00 and at least 15 units. UP Diliman's College Scholar award, listed on the Dean's List of Scholars, at 1.75 or better. Every one of these has a disqualifier that a qualifying average does not override.
"What GWA do you need for dean's list" has no single answer, and the reason is structural rather than accidental. CHED regulates programme content, not academic recognition. The one place its rules touch honors at all is graduation honors — and even there, Section 112 of the Manual of Regulations for Private Higher Education of 2008 begins by saying that "every higher education institution shall adopt its own policy and criteria for the selection of students who shall be awarded graduation honors."
That section does carry a fallback that many students have never seen: if a private school adopts no criteria at all, CHED's default applies, requiring 75 percent of the required subjects to be completed at the awarding institution and setting summa cum laude at 95 to 100 percent, magna cum laude at 90 to 94.9 percent and cum laude at 85 to 89.9 percent, each with no failing grade. That is the closest thing to a national honors number in Philippine higher education — and it applies to graduation, not to the dean's list, and only where a school has written nothing of its own. In practice every school has written something.
What the Published Rules Actually Say
| School | Award name | Threshold | Minimum load | Hard disqualifiers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ateneo de Manila | Dean's List (First and Second Honors) | Semestral QPI 3.70+ for First, 3.35–3.69 for Second | 15 academic units | No Dean's List during Intersession |
| De La Salle University | Dean's Honors List | Term GPA 3.400+ for First, 3.000–3.399 for Second | 12 academic units | Any grade below 2.0 in an academic course; any failure in a non-academic course; a cheating or discipline finding |
| UST Faculty of Arts and Letters | Dean's List | GWA at least 1.750 in the immediately preceding term | Full load for the section, or the units scheduled for the year level | Any failure or incomplete, including in PE and NSTP |
| Mapúa University | Dean's List | Term weighted average 1.75–1.00 and running GWA 2.00–1.00 | Curricular units for the trimester, not less than 15 | F, 5.00 or ABS in any course in any trimester; IP; C (Continuing); I (Incomplete); W for the trimester |
| UP Diliman | College Scholar, on the Dean's List of Scholars | Weighted average 1.75 or better | At least 15 units of academic credit or the normal prescribed load | Any grade below 3 in any academic or non-academic subject; INC not completed by the end of the semester |
Read the scales before comparing the numbers. Ateneo and De La Salle run 4.0-point scales where higher is better; UST, Mapúa and UP run 1.00 to 5.00 scales where lower is better. Our college grading system guide sets the scales side by side if you need the conversion sanity check.
The Requirement That Catches People Is the Unit Load
Every one of the five schools above sets a minimum load, and it is usually the reason a student with a beautiful average is not on the list.
Ateneo requires enrolment in at least 15 academic units for the semester, and states there is no Dean's List during Intersession at all. Mapúa requires the curricular number of units for the trimester but not less than 15, and separately excludes audit courses from the load count. De La Salle sets at least 12 academic units and adds a specific accounting rule for pass or fail courses: their units are excluded from the GPA computation but included in the total units used to qualify for trimestral honors. UP requires at least 15 units of academic credit or the normal load prescribed.
If you underloaded to protect your average, you may have disqualified yourself in the same move. That trade is worth understanding before you drop a subject.
The Second Requirement That Catches People Is a Single Grade
Most schools attach a floor on individual grades, not only on the average.
- De La Salle requires no grade below 2.0 in any academic course and no failure in any non-academic course. On its 4.0 scale, 2.0 is "Satisfactory" — well above passing. A student with a 3.6 average and one 1.5 does not make the list.
- UP Diliman requires no grade below 3 in any academic or non-academic subject for its honorific scholarships. Non-academic is doing real work in that sentence.
- UST's Faculty of Arts and Letters requires no failure and no incomplete grade, "including failure and incomplete in PE and NSTP."
- Mapúa publishes the longest exclusion list of the five: no F, 5.00 or ABS in any course in any trimester, no IP, no Continuing grade, no Incomplete, and no W for the trimester.
Read those as a single design decision. Schools are protecting the award from students who optimise their average by abandoning subjects. If you are counting on a dean's list place, the pending INC and the dropped elective matter more than the last two decimal places of your average.
Conduct and Integrity Clauses
De La Salle's rule bars students "found guilty of cheating or academic dishonesty and/or discipline offenses involving behavior unbecoming of a Lasallian" from the Dean's Honors List, and applies the same bar, permanently, to its University Honors List. Mapúa disqualifies students academically dismissed from a previous programme. UP's parallel rule sits on the graduation side, barring students found guilty of dishonesty or suspended for a year or more from graduating with honors even where the average qualifies.
These clauses are not decorative. They are the reason an appeal on the arithmetic will not always restore an award.
Term Honors Versus the Bigger Awards
Several schools stack a higher tier on top of the dean's list, and the tier usually adds a cumulative condition to the term one.
De La Salle's University Honors List requires at least six completed trimesters, a cumulative and term GPA of at least 3.400, and — the strict part — never having had a grade below 2.0 in an academic course, never having failed a non-academic course, and never having been found guilty of cheating or a major discipline offence. One bad term closes that door permanently, unlike the Dean's Honors List which resets each trimester.
Mapúa's President's List works by rank rather than by threshold: only students already on the Dean's List are eligible, and the number of top spots per programme is fixed by programme population, from 3 in total for a programme of 1 to 45 students up to 30 for a programme above 2,000. Only President's List students qualify for the academic scholarship, at a 100 percent tuition discount for a term weighted average of 1.50 to 1.00 and 50 percent for 1.75 to 1.51.
UP's University Scholar, at a weighted average of 1.45 or better, sits above College Scholar and is listed on the President's List of Scholars. UP is unusually blunt about what these are worth financially: the honorific scholarships "do not entitle the holders to any tuition waiver or discounts."
If money rather than recognition is the goal, treat the dean's list as a signal and go looking for the actual funding — our guides to CHED merit scholarships and scholarships for college students cover schemes that pay.
What Being on the List Gets You
The most concrete perk at two of the five schools is attendance relief. De La Salle grants students on the Dean's First and Second Honors List or University Honors List unlimited absences in academic courses for the succeeding trimester. Ateneo grants honor students unlimited absences in the semester immediately following the one that qualified them, unless an instructor says otherwise in the syllabus, and not in Intersession.
Certificates and recognition ceremonies follow their own rules — at De La Salle, only students on the Dean's First Honors List or University Honors List for the entire academic year are recognised at Academic Recognition Day, and six consecutive terms on the First Honors List brings automatic candidate-membership in the Jose Rizal Honor Society.
How to Check Your Own Standing Properly
- Find the clause, not the rumour. Ask the registrar or your college secretary for the handbook section. Every school above publishes theirs.
- Confirm the load rule first. It is the one requirement you can still fix during enrolment, and the one you cannot fix afterwards.
- List your non-academic courses. PE, NSTP and formation courses are excluded from some averages while still carrying disqualifying power. That combination surprises people every year.
- Clear any INC before the deadline. UP's cut-off is the day before registration for the second semester, or commencement day for the second-semester INC. Ateneo's is two weeks after grade release, extendable only by the instructor within the AVP's cut-off.
- Recompute using your school's inclusion rules, not a generic calculator. Our GWA computation guide walks through which courses go in and how rounding is specified.
- Know the appeal window. Grade corrections at Mapúa must be completed within one week of the release of final grades, and the guidelines state that no appeal is entertained after the lists are released.
And keep the two awards separate in your head. Making the dean's list every term is a strong predictor of graduating with honors, but the graduation award has its own cumulative average, residency percentage and disqualifiers — those are covered in Latin honors requirements.
Ready to find the right school? Browse schools and compare academic policies across hundreds of Philippine colleges and universities on SchoolFinderPH.
Sources
- Commission on Higher Education — CMO No. 40, series of 2008, Manual of Regulations for Private Higher Education of 2008 (official PDF)
- Ateneo de Manila University — College Student Handbook Volume 1, 2025 Edition
- De La Salle University — Student Handbook
- University of Santo Tomas, Faculty of Arts and Letters — Academic Policies
- Mapúa University Center for Scholarships and Financial Assistance — Guidelines on Dean's List, President's List, and Academic Scholarship (effective SY 2024-2025)
- UP Diliman Office of the University Registrar — Rules on Scholastic Standing
