Abstract
Mobility is one of the cornerstones of the Bologna reform. When mobility is integrated into the normal curriculum, the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) has proven a central element as it makes the efforts of students comparable and, in turn also seminars, teachers and universities. However, with the credit transfer system also grades need to be transferred and converted between national grading systems. This raises the problem of how the performance of students and, indirectly, quality of teaching is made comparable.
Making grades comparable is difficult enough within universities. The problem becomes critical when transboundary mobility is aspired. Focusing on comparability, this paper emphasises the tight linkage between ECTS and grades. In particular, conversion is not based upon a bureaucratic solution with a centralised conversion table and local solutions emerge. The empirical part of this paper is concerned with the astonishing variety and inconsistency of those solutions and the structural effects they unfold, one of them being that rational actors will not base their mobility decisions on the comparability of performances, but on secondary, cultural criteria.
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Notes
- 1.
Until the 1970s about 70% of all graduates found work in state-related occupations (compare Neave 1994).
- 2.
To understand the particular demands of such modernisation process, it seems necessary to briefly remind the nationalisation processes that higher education systems underwent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nationalisation implied that degree programmes were regulated to protected State administrations and professions against external competitors and ensured, in the case of higher education, systems selecting students for central positions in administration and key areas of modern societies (law; health; education; compare already Kant ([1794] 1995)).
- 3.
Two qualifications seem in place: first, the literature complaining about the variation of national ECTS regimes tends to overestimate the need for convergence and homogeneity. Second, the homogeneity implicit in these assumptions is not prescribed by the Bologna documents, thus, some countries focus more on such issues than others.
- 4.
It is no longer that the expected knowledge defines the (variable) timeframe within which students acquire this knowledge, but is the time frame that defines what students, on average, learn (Kühl 2012). This fundamental change in the assessment of academic qualification is based on the assumption that studying is just unpaid work. As a basic benchmark, students are expected to work 40 h a week with 6 weeks of holidays a year (Teichler 2003).
- 5.
Although students acquire on average about 60 ECTS (or equivalents) each year, their workload varies factually between 900 and 750 h per semester. It has long been discussed what the reasons may be why German students have to work 30 h for each ETCS point while Austrian students get the same credits for 25 h work. No final conclusion has been drawn from such inconsistencies of the ETCS framework.
- 6.
In higher education studies, organisational differences in individual local response on grading are often also linked to the degree of collegiality (vs. ‘managerialism’; e.g., Yokoyama 2006).
- 7.
It should be mentioned that this might well be perceived to unburden universities that find the bureaucracy linked to the Bologna Process overwhelming, particularly as their international engagement is minimal.
- 8.
The variation of implementation strategies may be hypothesised to depend on organisational features or governance strategies. It could be expected that the size, international connectedness, the degree of reformability and reputation are factors that shape distinct implementation strategies (compare Huber 2010, 2011).
- 9.
This is true for most cases. In some of the equivalence lists, new grades are invented to match the own national grading scale. For example, the University of Konstanz adds grades like 11.5, 10.5 and 9.5 in the column of Denmark although these grades (and the general strategy of weighting the space between grades, e.g. A+) do not exist; here, the only purpose of this imaginary scale is to give the impression that that the German scale is equivalent to those of other systems.
- 10.
It would be interesting to find out what procedures are applied to systematically use this external evaluation for internal governance; for instance, it would be interesting to find cases where such agreements were not prolonged because of a quality mismatch. Conceptually, the reflection and correction of internal perception through external observations have often been identified as core to the learning organisation. It would be interesting to show how such reflexive procedure is established. It is equally interesting to investigate structural features that impede organisations from learning from this information (which may be expected to represent the majority of cases).
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Huber, M. (2012). Mobility, ECTS and Grades: Problems with the Comparability of Grades. In: Curaj, A., Scott, P., Vlasceanu, L., Wilson, L. (eds) European Higher Education at the Crossroads. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3937-6_12
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