ECTS, the European Credit Transfer System, is a system based on allocation and transfer of academic credits developed by the European Commission to provide common procedures to guarantee the full transferability of credits for university studies abroad in order that they might count towards a final qualification in the home country. It provides a way of measuring and comparing academic merits and transferring them from one institution to another.

Courses are assigned a number of credits depending on the workload students need in order to achieve the expected learning outcomes.

ECTS defines the regular workload of a student for one academic year as 60 ECTS credits and 30 ECTS for a semester. This makes one ECTS credit corresponds to 25 to 30 hours of student effort.

Under ECTS, credits have three purposes:

1. They assign a value to each particular course of study and indicate the amount of work required to complete it successfully;
2. They prescribe the amount of work that must be successfully completed for a degree to be awarded;
3. They are used to calculate a student's normal workload for a particular period of time.

Further information available