Saint-Louis University - Bruxelles
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ECTS Credits and Saint-Louis’ Grading System

 

ECTS Credits

 

The ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) is a key instrument of the Bologna process, whose objective is to increase the degree of compatibility among the different European national education systems. Created in 1989 as part of the Erasmus programme, the ECTS aims to facilitate student mobility and inter-university cooperation.

 

Each course in a Bachelor’s or Master’s programme carries a specific number of ECTS credits. Each credit is in fact a numerical value expressing the total workload a student is expected to accomplish in order to satisfy a course’s learning objectives.

 

A credit thus represents not only the number of class hours per week but also the applied exercise sessions, library research, hours spent studying and learning course material, laboratory work, etc.

 

A Bachelor’s programme comprises 180 credits, or 60 per year. Therefore, a student must obtain approximately 30 credits per term.

 

Full academic recognition is essential for the Erasmus exchanges to be viable. This means that a period of study abroad (courses and examinations) effectively replaces an equivalent period in a student’s sending university, even if the programmes of study are different.

 

Grades

 

The European Commission created the ECTS to help sending universities interpret grades achieved by their students in partner institutions.

 

Moreover, at Saint-Louis, as is the case for many partner universities, there is a single grading scale that is applied in all programmes of the different degree levels and which aims to give complementary information on a grade achieved by an Erasmus student. This grading scale does not by any means replace the grading system applied in a student’s home university.

 

Depending on the Faculty, courses are given over a term or over the entire academic year. In general, a course given 2 hours per week for one term is equivalent to 30 hours of class time and counts for 5 credits. Some courses with a heavier work load count for 6 credits.

 

Most courses are graded on a scale of 20, and all courses have the same importance.A grade of 10 out of 20 is necessary to acquire the credits related to a course.

 

The grading scale applied at Saint-Louis is the following :

 

 

All these grades and related information are mentioned on the transcript of records a student receives after the exam period. The original document is sent to the student’s sending university.

UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles | Boulevard du Jardin botanique, 43 | 1000 Bruxelles | Belgique | Tél : +32 2 211 78 11 | info-slb@uclouvain.be | N° d'entreprise : TVA BE 0419 052 272