Thousands of EU Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) active in student exchanges are at present using unfair grade conversion systems, mostly based on direct and subjective procedures that neglect outstanding academic performance in traditionally low marking areas, but also advancing mediocre students who are marked highly in their exams within inflated education systems where the majority of students receive high marks and the minority of excellent students receive only slightly higher marks.
A direct aim of the EGRACONS consortium is to achieve a simple and unified interpretation and implementation of the ECTS grade conversion tables as recommended in the EC’s ECTS User’s guide since 2009. This ambitious project requires a thorough prior study of the variety of grading habits at the EU Higher Education Institutions, careful selection of data and an identification of a conversion algorithm to enable compatibility of the input and output data.
The ultimate objectives of the EGRACONS project are:
This is intended to be achieved by the following outputs of the project:
By no means is the EGRACONS tool intended to be used to assess educational quality of universities. On the contrary, the proposed system will not show statistical data collected from individual teachers. Instead, the system will be based on broader data categories, grouped under aggregation levels computing data from several academic years at once. This is necessary to obtain robust data samples needed for objective conversions.
Consortium: Ghent University, UNICA, Santander Group Association, University of Liège, Sapienza University of Rome, University of Rouen, University of Leon, Vilnius University, University of Gothenburg, University of Essex, The University of Lausanne, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Stichting Hoger Onderwijs Nederland, University of Warsaw
Contacting Authority: European Commission: Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA)