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[EGRACONS newsletter] Newsletter I |
Welcome!
Welcome to the Egracons first Newsletter issue. This tool will be used to send updates on the project's activities. You can forward it to colleagues and partners who may be interested and invite others to subscribe on our website. You can also contact us if with relevant information here.
Thank you for your collaboration.
Engaging European universities in the debate
The Egracons project consortium wishes to engage as many European higher education institutions as possible in the debate on grade conversion. For this reason Egracons was present again this year at the EAIE conference in Prague on 18 September 2014 and at the Eracon conference that took place Nicosia, Cyprus in April 2014.
At the EAIE the project was discussed in the session Level ground: grade conversion and grading systems in Europe and beyond that focused on how grading tables will lead to a better global interpretation and harmonisation of grading systems, taking into consideration grade distribution, class rank, class rigor and word descriptors, for example. The results from the first testing phase of the Egracons conversion tool were presented by Valère Meus, project co-ordinator and Luciano Saso. The other speakers are Daphne Scherer, European Commission, Belgium and Margaret Wenger, Educational Credential Evaluators, Inc, USA.
During the ERACON conference the initiative was presented by by Luciano Saso, from Sapienza University of Rome and the project co-ordinator Valère Meus, from Ghent University. Over 80 participants attended the session which was preceeded by a lively discussion on grading cultures in Europe.
Publication of Grading Table Instructions
The Egracons team has published a set of guidelines for institutions to create their own grading tables. The Egracons tool, that will allow direct and automatic conversions grades, is being built on the basis of annual, statistically-based grading tables supplied by individual institutions as part of an overall database. Detailed instructions on how to construct grading tables are available here.
Publication of first Country Reports
The first Country Reports have been published on our website. The document is provision and may be amended over the course of the project. We welcome suggestions or contributions from countries not represented in the report.
Please access them here.
New ISCED Codes
UNESCO recently revised the ISCED fields of education and training classification and approved it during its 37th General Conference in November 2013. The new ISCED codes are used in the project to aggregate degrees.
Following this revision, the European Commission's Unit for Statistics, studies and surveys elaborated a preliminary list of ISCED 2013 detailed fields, indicating the correspondences with the previous Field of Education and Training 1999 classification (FOET 1999 – based on ISCED 1997). The Hungarian National Agency completed the list by adding the former Erasmus codes and developed a search tool, which allows your institutions to find easily the fields of education and training and their correspondences in the three code systems.
The ISCED-F 2013 search tool was published on the Erasmus+ website under Erasmus+ Tools.
Please find the Manual here and the list of codes here.
Launch of Egracons video
The Egracons promotional video has been launched with the aim to better explain the complex issue of grade conversion and the objectives of the project. Please click here to access the video.
