ECTS grading scale

The ECTS grading scale is a grading system defined in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) framework by the European Commission. Since many grading systems co-exist in Europe and, considering that interpretation of grades varies considerably from one country to another, if not from one institution to another, the ECTS grading scale has been developed to provide a common measure and facilitate the transfer of students and their grades between European higher education institutions, by allowing national and local grading systems to be interchangeable. Grades are reported on a carefully calibrated and uniform A-to-F scale combined with keywords and short qualitative definitions. Each institution makes its own decision on how to apply the ECTS grading scale to its system.

The ECTS grade is not meant to replace the local grades but to be used optionally and additionally to effectively "translate" and "transcript" a grade from one institution to another. The ECTS grade is indicated alongside the mark awarded by the host institution on the student's transcript of records. The receiving institutions then convert the ECTS grade to their own system. Higher education institutions are recommended (though not forced) to provide ECTS grades for all of their students and to take into account the ECTS grades awarded by other institutions. A certain amount of flexibility is advised, since the ECTS grading scale was designed to improve transparency of a variety of grading systems and cannot, by itself, cover all possible cases.

The main requirements for establishing ECTS grades are the availability of sufficiently detailed primary data, cohorts of sufficient size to ensure validity, proper statistical methods and regular quality control of the results obtained through the use of the scale.

To tackle the problem of the different approaches to grading across European educational systems, in the past years ECTS guidelines suggested that, in addition to their national scale, European institutions might use a European grading scale as a translation device into other grading systems. Such European scale was based on the statistical distribution of passing grades in each programme, which showed how the national scale was actually being used in that context and allowed for comparison with the statistical distribution of grades in a parallel programme of another institution.

As a first step, the implementation of the ECTS scale required the collection of statistical data in the institutions who were willing to participate in the scheme to make their grades more transparent. In educational systems where ranking of students in each course unit/module was a standard procedure, statistical data could be provided for the very cohort in which the grade had been obtained. In the other cases, the statistical distribution was based on the grades given over the previous two or three years to a specific reference group - a single programme or a group of homogeneous programmes – from which a consistent grading pattern could be derived. These data, collected in a large number of institutions in Europe, have shown how national grading scales are actually being used. For example, teachers in French institutions are more consistently using the lower half of their scale, while their Italian counterparts are making more use of grades in the upper half of it. As for the subject area, the data from many Italian institutions showed that teachers in Engineering tend to mark lower than teachers in Humanities. Although these patterns had already been perceived by practitioners on an impressionistic basis, it is interesting to find that they are supported by statistical evidence. The grade distribution table developed for a specific reference group allows for a single grade currently obtained to be positioned in its own context, thus making it easier to understand the level of the student’s performance and compare it with that of students with a similar position in other contexts.

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