An significant aspect of the Bologna Process is the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation Scheme (ECTS), which aims to enable foreign students to make the most of their study experience abroad. The ECTS was initially targeted at Erasmus students as a tool for the appreciation of the courses and programmes they learned abroad.
ECTS is also used to identify not only experiences of research exchange, but also full-time Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate (PhD) degrees. A final degree certificate, a test that you will usually take at the end of a degree, is the only exception not included or approved by the ECTS. The European Credit Transfer Scheme monitors and compares learning achievements and makes it easy for students to transfer credits from one institution of higher education to another.
The ECTS credit system makes degree programmes and student success more open and comparable across all European Higher Education Region (EHEA) member countries. Within Europe, ECTS has replaced or complemented the various local (national standards. Thanks to the ECTS credit scheme, EHEA students can go abroad and obtain a degree that would be widely recognized in the EHEA.
You get awarded ECTS credit points by completing a course, lecture, or module. The amount of workload you have completed in that span of time is represented by every ECTS credit point. This implies that a module or course with 10 ECTS credits usually has almost twice the workload of a course with 5 ECTS. One ECTS credit point can be equivalent to an average of between 25 and 30 actual study hours, depending on the region. The European Commission also established policies for ECTS grading systems in addition to the ECTS-credits. Since there are almost as many different grading systems as nations, its aim is to make grades comparable easily.
The outcomes are divided into two subgroups before the assessment: pass and fail. The outcomes are therefore, independent of the students who have failed a course. The ECTS grading scale can only provide an orientation about the performance of a student due to its relative nature, as the grading depends on the performance of the group, which can vary, especially in smaller classes. Therefore, the same student will receive different grades under the same success measure, depending on the class as well in terms of how competitive it is. The ECTS grading systems, however, are much more straightforward than many national grading systems, helping to equate your academic performance to that of other European students.
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