The ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) tables and Grading scale

ECTS tables and Grading scale

In the internationalization processes of the Universities, the transparency of the educational offer is an essential prerequisite for:

  1. allow international students to choose their destination for a period of mobility or a full cycle of studies;
  2. allow international teachers to choose their partners for academic collaborations and integrated study courses.

The ECTS tables and grading scale are tools designed to facilitate the transfer of academic results (expressed in terms of grades) between different national assessment systems. They are adopted by the universities in the countries belonging to the European Higher Education Area and they allow the conversion of the grades from one country into grades used in another country, following common European rules.
The University of Udine, according to the European directives that norm the ECTS system, recognizes equivalence: 1 CFU = 1 ECTS.
The use of the ECTS system is one of the commitments undertaken by the University of Udine in the European Charter for Higher Education (ECHE), a document essential to access European education programmes.

ECTS tables based on the statistical distribution of grades

The University of Udine in compliance with the ECTS Users' guide 2015 annually prepares the ECTS tables that contain the statistical distribution of grades achieved by homogeneous groups of students in a given period.
In the ECTS tables, for each grade, the percentage of students who actually achieved it is reported. They then show how a national scale of grades is used within an institution, on the basis of their own voting policies and they also allow, through the comparison of the cumulated percentages, the conversion of grades between different national systems.

Within each field of study, students are subdivided by study cycle (first, second and single cycle).

The ECTS scale is used on a residual basis for the conversion of the grades obtained at institutions that have not yet adopted the ECTS tables, but only the scale.

Please note that the ECTS scale allows the transfer of grades only among universities of countries belonging to the European Higher Education Area that have adopted the same ECTS scale. It also should not be confused with other grading scales expressed in letters of the alphabet.

Outside the European Higher Education Area several voting systems exist and often coexist, but no general mechanisms have been defined at international level for the conversion of votes similar to the ECTS.