Credit transfer system in trouble

The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), which is supposed to underpin the Erasmus student mobility programme, is under review because of doubts about its effectiveness.

The European Commission has put a moratorium on approving applications to join the scheme, because of growing concern that the reason why only a few institutions were able to secure the ECTS ‘label’ was not because of minor technical difficulties but because of a deeper failure to use the system properly.

The ECTS was developed under the EU’s Erasmus programme, which provides undergraduate and masters students with the opportunity to study abroad as part of their course. ECTS is supposed to allow the study undertaken in different universities to be systematically measured, recorded and recognised. The credits themselves are based on the student workload required to achieve the objectives of a programme and these objectives are preferably specified in terms of the learning outcomes and competences that the student is meant to acquire.

As ECTS is the only such system extensively tested across Europe, it has been endorsed by education ministers as the logical choice to underpin mobility under the wider scheme for aligning European higher education institutions, the ‘Bologna process’.

The label was introduced to allow institutions to show that they had applied the ECTS system correctly across all of their undergraduate and master courses. The intention was to raise the profile of the institution as an attractive, reliable and transparent partner in European and international co-operation, and tell prospective students that they are dealing with courses that fit into a coherent European system of higher education.

But only a small number of universities have been able to win the label, even among those which considered themselves to be in a good enough position to make an application worthwhile. In the first round, in 2003, only 11 of 91 applicants were successful, although the Commission was upbeat about the disappointing result.

"The low number of prospective label-holders may initially come as a shock," it conceded, "although the rather straightforward reasons for rejection ought to give rise to optimism: most institutions ruled themselves out by submitting incomplete applications, a problem that could be solved without much ado during the next round."

But the following year’s round awarded only three labels, which are valid for three years. The low success rate continues to the present. In the 2006 round, for example, only seven out of 46 applicants were approved.

In June this year the Education Commissioner Ján Figel’ suggested that the focus would shift from the whole institution to individual university departments. "In the future, we will make sure that individual departments are properly implementing ECTS, especially those involved in Erasmus," Figel’ said. "By the end of the decade I hope that ECTS will have become not just a standard system for Erasmus mobility, but also a system for all institutions participating in EU higher education programmes."

But rather than heralding a shift to departmental ECTS labels, this was followed by an announcement that there would be no round of label awards in 2007. Instead the emphasis will be on local and national support for ECTS, in particular through the work of ECTS counsellors, higher education personnel who have hands-on experience with ECTS and can give ‘peer-to-peer’ advice on how the system should be properly implemented.

• Ian Mundell is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.

The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), which is supposed to underpin the Erasmus student mobility programme, is under review because of doubts about its effectiveness.