Final Report Pilot Project - Phase 1

6. Length of the academic year in Europe6.1. Results of Tuning surveysJust as with defining the typical student, it does not seem easy tocope with the variety of the lengths of the actual study period peracademic year within Europe. As stated before, the length of theacademic year, i.e. the number of working hours of an academic year,is one of the factors in determining how many student working hoursone ECTS credit contains. In Europe the length of the academic year atfirst glance seems to differ from country to country and in some caseswithin a country from institution to institution. Although time in itselfis clearly an insufficient measure, the Tuning project has done a surveyto obtain a better picture of the actual situation. From the acquiredinformation a number of general conclusions can be drawn. The firstone is that a distinction has to be made between the actual number ofteaching weeks, the number of (independent) study weeks andfieldwork, the preparation time for examinations and the number ofexamination weeks. The total of these gives the actual length of theteaching period and offers therefore comparable information perdiscipline, institution and/or country. The second conclusion is that,when programmes are broken down, the differences in length prove tobe much smaller than one would expect at first glance.This last conclusion is in line with the information that has beencollected about the official length of the academic year of institutionsand countries, e.g. the beginning and the end of an academic year.This calculation takes into account vacation periods during which it isnormal for students to be expected to continue to work, prepareassessments, projects, dissertations. In the latter case nearly allcountries fit in the range of 34 to 40 weeks per year. If it is acceptedthat a week contains 40 to 42 hours, the actual number of «officialhours» in which a student is expected to work during an academic yearruns from 1400 to 1680 (1800 20 ). Even in the cases of systems wherethe formal specification of hours is lower, it is evident that, in practice,because of work undertaken in vacation periods, the actual number ofhours corresponds with the general norm. The point average seems tolie around 1520 hours per year. Given the fact that an academic yearcontains 60 ECTS credits, one credit represents then approximately20In a number of countries it has been stated in law that an academic year forstudents has a workload of 1500 to 1800 hours.241