Q6. What is the ECTS? What does it consist of?

ECTS - the European Credit Transfer System - is an instrument which aims to create transparency, to establish closer conditions between Higher Education Institutions and to expand the choices available to students for their study abroad.

The ECTS was developed by the European Commission to establish common procedures to guarantee the academic recognition of studies abroad. It also allows the classification and comparison of knowledge assessment results, and enables their transfer from one university to another.

It is a system in which credits are proportional to the total student workload, and not the number of lecture hours.

ECTS credits represent the workload of a student, in the form of points (1 to 60), which are assigned to each course unit, and which just express the portion that each course unit represents in comparison to the total amount of study hours required to successfully complete a year of studies: lectures, practical work, seminars, essay writing, literature review, individual work and examinations or other methods of assessment .

Each academic year of all study programmes corresponds to a total of 60 ECTS credits, and therefore:

- 30 ECTS credits are the equivalent, as a rule, of 1 semester;

- 60 ECTS credits represent the academic workload of 1 full year of studies.