Final Report Pilot Project - Phase 1

only have more countries decided to introduce a national credit system—which in nearly all cases coincides with ECTS— but also a debate hasbeen initiated about the structure in cycles of the higher educationsequence and about the desired length of the study programmes. Aconsensus appears to have developed in Europe about the followinggeneral structure:—First cycle or undergraduate: 180-240 credits (see the conclusionsof the Helsinki conference 2001, where a general consensus wasachieved on this range of lengths, later on confirmed by theSalamanca Convention).—Second cycle or (post)graduate (the required length is subject ofdiscussion).—Third cycle or doctoral (180 to 240 credits).2. Allocation of credits to courses2.1. Student workloadECTS was designed as a credit system based on student workload.This was in accordance with developments in the 1980s in a number ofEU countries like in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the UnitedKingdom. In those countries the (national) credit systems were set up asaccumulation systems. ECTS could therefore be easily implemented. Inother countries, which had based their teaching systems on the numberof contact or teaching hours, implementation proved to be much morecomplicated. Initially, in these countries the following approach wasmostly used: Allocation of credits to courses was based on the numberof teaching hours for each course unit. This approach is based on theassumption that the number of teaching hours reflects more or less theworkload involved for the student. However, in practice this is not alwaysthe case. Experiences in Italy and Spain, for example, show that in thelong run this approach is not satisfactory. The same teaching load maycorrespond to different student workloads. In a number of countries thesituation is complicated by the fact that the contents of the curricula to alarge extent are decided at central government level: there is a fixed listof subjects which has to be taught. This approach leads to rather rigidcourse structures and a fair allocation of credits becomes problematic.Some countries, which have taken workload —in terms of thequantity of student work rather than teaching hours— as the basis forallocation, have met other kinds of problems. In a number of cases231