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Volume 12, Issue 1  
REGIONAL NEWS
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
RESEARCH
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HOW-TO
Working with ECTS (European Credit Transfer System)by WES staff members Calculating U.S. credit equivalents for studies completed in Europe can be a difficult task. This is especially true when courses are listed on academic records without any indication of their relative weight in terms of units, credits or instructional hours. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) is a new tool that can help American evaluators convert European university courses into U.S. semester credits.
ECTS was developed by the European Union to establish common procedures for recognizing studies completed abroad. The main goal of ECTS is to promote the exchange of academic information among European institutions of higher education in order to facilitate student mobility.
The system was largely established on the basis of mutual trust and confidence among member institutions. Students participating in ECTS receive full credit for all academic work successfully carried out at any of the ECTS partner institutions.
ECTS is a credit system based on a definition of what constitutes a full-time academic course load. Credits are assigned to all academic work (lectures, laboratory work, seminars, private study and theses) that comprises an integral part of the program of study. Credits are awarded only when the course has been completed and all required examinations have been successfully taken. In ECTS terms, 60 credits represent the work load of one year of full-time study, 30 credits are given for a semester and 20 credits for a trimester. Within this framework, each institution allocates credits among its various courses. Since it was established some 10 years ago, ECTS has been widely adopted. The following examples illustrate how different universities are using the system.
The Lizentiat (Lic.Phil), offered by the Department of English at the University of Bern, requires a minimum of eight semesters of study in one major and two minor subjects. The subject area of English is comprised of the following: medieval English language and literature (MELL); English and American literature (EAL); and modern English language (MEL). Each of these can be studied as either a major or minor subject. The Lizentiat requires 300 ECTS credits. This description is translated into ECTS terms in the table below:
ECTS GradesAnother useful feature of the ECTS is the common grading scale. It allows institutions to award grades using the home scale and also gives them the option of converting that grade into a common ECTS grade. The University of Bern has adopted the system as follows:
Stockholm University (Sweden)Stockholm University has its own point system. The academic year is divided into course units and each unit is worth a certain number of points (poangs). A point is equivalent to one week of full-time work (40 hours per week), which includes lectures and independent study. One academic year consists of 40 points. The bachelor’s degree (kandidatexamen) requires a total of 120 points (three years of full-time study) including 60 points in the major subject and an independent thesis of 10 points. The master’s degree (magisterexamen) requires at least 160 points (four years of full-time study) including 80 points in the major and an independent thesis of 20 points or two shorter theses worth 10 points each. Each point at Stockholm University is equivalent to 1.5 ECTS credits. Thus a student who completes one year or 40 points at Stockholm will have earned 60 ECTS credits. The bachelor’s degree therefore requires a total of 180 ECTS credits while the master’s degree requires 240 ECTS credits. The table below shows a sample program.
Vienna University of Economics (Austria)The university has adapted the ECTS credits as follows:
In this particular case, the number of ECTS credits allocated per course is determined by the nature of the course itself (for example, lecture, tutorial, pro-seminar) and not by the number of hours of weekly instruction. A one-year, full-time program is still 60 ECTS credits.
University College Cork has simply adopted the ECTS credit system as its own. The courses, known as modules, are given credit values ranging from 5 to 20 (credits) depending on their relative importance in the program of study. The combined credit values assigned to all courses add up to a total of 60 credits per academic year.
As the above examples illustrate, the ECTS system has been adapted differently from institution to institution. The ECTS provides a common gauge of what constitutes a full-time annual or semester credit load and makes the conversion of courses completed in Europe into U.S. semester credits a simple arithmetic exercise. For American evaluators to benefit from this system, it is important to find out how a particular institution applies ECTS to its courses.
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