All the participants to our Erasmus Mundus project fully use the ECTS mechanism to quantify and evaluate the study period of student in their own university. Therefore, it will be easy to reuse this mechanism in our Erasmus Mundus master of science. Moreover, the existing Master of Science in data-mining between Nantes, Lyon, Alessandria and Bucharest has shown to what extent the “grading scale” between Italy, France and Romania are compatible.

Note that, according to the ECTS mechanism, the “grading scale” will be based on a five-mark scale, with the following definition:

To ease the comparison and the harmonization, here are recalled the grading scale used in each of the countries participating to the project and their corresponding meaning.

France

Universities and high schools usually use a 20-points scale with the following meaning:

Note that it looks to be difficult to automatically translate the 20-points scale in ECTS grade. Moreover, some high education institutions try now to directly use the ECTS grades. This is what we shall try here.

Italy

Universities use generally a 30-point scale which meaning is the following:

Romania

Romanian universities use a 10-point scale, 5 being the minimum grade for passing. A 10 is not rare to score and a 9 means excellent. The average goes between 7 and 8.

Spain

High education uses a 10-point scale in Spain. Marks are rounded to one decimal place.

The following table gives a rough approximation of the correspondence between grades in Spanish academic records and ECTS:

Obtaining diploma requires the students obtain 120 ECTS after their four semesters study. Obtaining diploma requires that the students have got 120 ECTS after their four semesters study. Among the modules, we distinguish three categories: common courses (CC), specialty courses (SC) and methodology (MC) or language (LC). The credit value associated to each common course or specialty course module is 4 ECTS, while the credit value of methodology and language modules is 3.

During the first semester, the students need to follow 6 “common modules”, one “language module” and one “methodology module”, which corresponds to 6x4 + 2x3 = 30 ECTS

During the second and third semester, the students will have to get two “common modules”, four “specialty modules” and two “language modules”. It is supposed that our students follow two different language courses. Usually, one corresponds to the language of the country where they are staying and the other to the language of the country where they will stay. However, it is also possible for them to improve their English. For each of the second and the third semester this corresponds to 2×4 + 4×4 +2×3 = 30 ECTS. Note that the students have to choose two specialties, one for each semester that are locally taught. Consequently, they have to visit the places where those specialties are taught.

The practical training in an industrial environment or in an academic laboratory that lasts all the fourth semester is scored 30 ECTS.

The following table summarizes all this information: