Information for future students

During this phase of the life of a joint programme it should be necessary to provide – as we have already discussed – all the information to future applicants and to define also the aspects about the students administration.

In compliance with the objectives of the present Handbook, we will analise only some administrative aspects concerning the students, by always bearing in mind that all the provided information must be clear, simple and comprehensible.

3.3.1 Some useful documents

there are some documents which can be useful to manage the relationships between our future students and the partner institutions organising the joint programme.

the first of them is certainly a ‘statement’ signed by the applicant granting permission to obtain personal information: in order to verify the information provided by candidates, it is necessary to obtain an explicit authorization for handling their personal data, by considering that in many systems it is not possible to access to any personal information concerning the previous career of the student without this explicit authorization.

furthermore, such authorization is useful to publish a possible classification for the evaluation of students participating in the selection for entering the course.

A second instrument useful to the relationship with the students is suggested by the Erasmus mundus programme: the ‘student agreement’.

the programme Guide3_{defines the student Agreement as:}

Student agreement

Joint website

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"an agreement signed by the consortium and student enrolled in the joint [masters] course explicitly indicating any academic, financial and administrative modalities related to the student's participation in the joint course and, if applicable, the award and usage of the scholarship."

this is a kind of document, where they indicate rights and duties of the future students and the commitments the institutions engage to carry out – by explicitly inserting the name of the national degrees which will be issued at the end of the course – it is certainly an instrument of transparency useful to institutions – with respect to the duties of students, and for students, according to their rights.

the Education, Audiovisual and culture Executive Agency (EAcEA)4 _provide

examples of student Agreements useful to all the joint courses5_{developed by the}

Erasmus mundus consortia managing the joint courses within the programme. It is useful to provide a website or webpage exclusively dedicated to joint course where to insert:

(A) the subjects of the joint course;

(B) the list of the institutions participating in the programme;

(c) the name of the national qualifications which will be issued at the end of the course;

(D) All the information related to the selection procedure for the admission to the course;

(E) a single contact for the clarification and information requests.

It is not recommended the realisation of more webpage within the sites of the institutions participating in the course: indeed, the information provided to students would be missing and there would be the risk to provide different answers to the same questions, by reasoning in a ‘national’ and not in a ‘joint’ perspective.

3.3.2 Grading and credit systems: some clarifications

there are different voting systems in the various higher education systems and very often they differ not only for what it concerns their numeric structure (usage of numeric ascending and descending scale; percentages, letters, etc.) but the cultural aspects of the national system: here is the problem related to the marks conversion in the different systems or institutions.

4 _{http://eacea.ec.europa.eu}

sELEctION pHAsE

A mark can have very different meanings depending on the qualification. Besides this, it is possible that the mathematical equivalence does not reflect the cultural complexity behind it, leading to an oversimplified ‘translation’ of the mark of origin. By adding the fact that in some systems there are evaluation scales within the institutions and therefore it is possible to find qualifications from the same system but with a different evaluation, the panorama becomes further complicated. It is very rare to find official conversion mark scales within the different systems as well as official conversion formulas studied at a national level in order to ‘translate’ a mark obtained abroad with a national one.

Let’s think about the case where a given mark constitutes an admission requirement for a joint course: which parameter can help our applicants to understand if they meet this requirement?

the solution of a summarizing table including all the existing systems cannot be adopted, given that the candidacies for the admission to the course could come from any country. It would be possible to use the Ects grading scale, but also in this case there would be systems which we have not considered.

It is recommended to study an internal conversion procedure to evaluate the performances of the degrees presented for the admission to the course, in addition to establish a single voting system within the joint programme.

Let’s think also about the used credit system: as we know there are different concepts of ‘credit’ referred to the workload (1.3.7); which system should be used? Also in this case, the Ects credits are very helpful and they can constitute the system to be adopted by the whole consortium organising the joint programme. this means that each institution will issue a given number of credits by using a single reference scale in order to not confuse students participating in the course and who must evaluate the final qualification.

It is not possible to adopt the solution of using different credit systems on the basis of the institution where the course is held within a joint programme. However it is better to avoid it since finally the qualification will must ‘speak only one language’.

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