Just found a few courses that I can do here in Sweden (distance) which give 20 points (for each course) here ( you also need 120 points for a degree here) which translates into 30 ECTS points. Does anybody know how many American hour credits this turns into. As a guide the swedes believe that 1 weeks full time study gives you one point - you generally only do 1 course at a time. The best thing from my point of view is that as I am living in Sweden the course, and credits are free and one of the course leaders has said that if I study distance I may be able to sneak in a second course.
Do you automatically get American credits for university courses you take in Sweden? Won't your Swedish courses have to go through some US convalidation agency, with the costs involved, in orther for them to be evaluated and approved by a US institution?
there is that cost but compared to paying for a possible 20 points (if not more) it is a cheap cost. According to the website of the uni here most european universities should be offering the ECTS points equivalen to the local grades as well as the local grades
ECTS credits? What is this? is it some standard accepted by US universities, or is it a European standard used by all EU countries or what is it? First time I've heard of it.
European standards used by all EU countries, as well as by some that are not yet in the EU (Kosova, Macedonia)
A system to standardise the wide variety of college credits around europe, it makes it easier for students and graduates to move around the continent and have an easily understandable transcript -- in theory Its an European Union idea
silly question I know but what is the differance between a semester and a term - in my school they were one and the same thing but it seems from those websites mentioned above that you get more credits for a terms work???
OK, here’s the math as I see it: To be awarded a new three-year European bachelor’s degree a student must earn a total (minimum) of 180 European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) credits. Generally speaking 60 ECTS credits is considered the standard yearly load for a full-time student (30 credits are given for a semester and 20 credits for a trimester). The weighting of the credit is workload based and 60 credits equals an average workload of approximately 1500 hours, which corresponds to around 25 student work hours per credit. So, essentially a three-year degree is averaged out as 4500 hours of class and private study time. In the US, one semester credit is defined as a weekly one-hour class over a 15-week semester, totaling 15 hours of instruction per semester for each credit. For each period spent in the classroom, a student is expected to devote two hours (30 per semester) of preparation meaning that student workload per credit is 45 hours a semester. So a student who takes 15 credits (typical full-time load) is expected to spend about 30 weekly hours in preparation for a total of 45 hours of study per week, or 675 a semester. The total full-time load a year would then be 1350 hours, and, by extension, the total student workload for the average four-year bachelor’s degree is 5400 hours. Technically speaking therefore the equivalency is not quite 2:1 rather it is 45:25 or 9:5. But, I guess a straight 2 to 1 makes the math a little easier. So, although the European degree is 180 credits and the US degree is 120 credits the equivalency is not 1.5 to 1, as it might seem at first glance. In terms of credit equivalency the math is reasonably simple. However, in terms of a straight equivalency, credential for credential, there is of course a problem from the numerical standpoint: The US degree requires more study hours (typically this is the general education portion) than the new European degree – 4 years vs. 3 years or 5400 hours of study vs. 4500 hours of study. So, faced with this, does the U.S. graduate admission department accept the European three-year degree as adequate preparation for entry into a U.S. master’s program? From a functional standpoint, I would argue yes – others may, and do disagree.
