The Egracons Project and Tool
The Egracons (European Grade Conversion System) project was a Lifelong Learning project (2012-2015) co-funded by the European commission aiming to facilitate exchange mobility by working out a conversion system based on ECTS grade conversion tables as recommended in the European 2015 ECTS Users’ guide. The project ended on 1 october 2015 and aimed to build up a wide-spread awareness and common understanding of the different grading systems in Europe and to enable an accurate interpretation of grades (or marks) given abroad, leading to a fair and manageable conversion of these grades to a local grade in the home institution. The results of the project therefore benefit students, academic staff, the administration and even future employers. The project mapped grading practices in countries and individual institutions leading to a full description of the grading systems in use in Europe. It also developed an online, web-based Egracons tool that allows direct and automatic conversions of grades on the basis of annual, statistically-based grading tables supplied by individual institutions as part of an overall database. Please find detailed instructions on how to construct a Grading Table, instructions on how to fill in the Grading Tables, a template and an example here.The tool can be freely used provided an HEI has submitted its grading tables and after individual registration for the tool at https://tool.egracons.eu
The Egracons tool aggregates degree programmes (of the same cycle, so there are separate grading tables for Bachelors and Masters) under the same ISCED study field codes to make up one single reference group. Please note that the new 2013 ISCED codes are used. The choice of this aggregation criterion is critical because, in order to make the conversions simpler, it should be uniformly applied by HEIs of each country (or educational system of a region). This makes it possible to have a one-to-one correspondence between reference groups of different countries. Grading tables based on individual degree programmes, or even worse, individual course units, do not offer this correspondence, as they cannot be readily compared and may be too dependent on the grading behaviour of individual professors. If so desired, institutions can, however, opt for a wider reference group, provided they still include the full list of BA and MA degrees.
The Egracons project (2012-2015) developed a user-friendly web-based tool for grade conversion (https://tool.egracons.eu) that is available free of charge to all participating European HEIs (and beyond) provided their supply their grade distribution tables. The tool enables a transparent interpretation of students' accomplishments abroad. In order to do so it collects grade distribution tables from as many HEIs as possible.
The tool enables both single conversion (a single student grade to a single grade) and multiple conversion (all the grades of a TOR) from a university abroad to the home university. The grades of several students can also be exported to a separate Excel document.
Conversions are only possible between HEIs who have supplied their grading distribution table data to Egracons. These should be uploaded and re-uploaded annually in autumn. See the instructions on the dedicated page.
The data are protected and subject to discretion. Only persons in charge of the conversion of grades in HEIs (such as Erasmus coordinators, Programme Directors and IRO-officers) can have access to the full functionality of the tool. They have to login to get access and have to be validated by the local administrator and use their institutional email address. Users have one or more of 3 user roles: Converter, Uploader and Local administrator. The local administrator manages all users and their roles of his/her institution (add, delete, modify). They can also edit the HEI's basic information.
General information on the grading scale used and the grading practices in the country are also available in the country reports.
Students will not be allowed to use the tool directly but exchange advisers will obviously be able to provide them with a lot of general and background information on grading practices and make simulations. The country reports will be made available to all on the website.
Participation in the tool is voluntary and free of chanrge, and institutions willing to take part can find all the information in the General Introduction to Grading Tables and the Grading Table Data Template instructions. HEIs are invited to supply their data as soon as possible since the tool is already operational. Guidance will be provided wherever necessary.
Description of grading systems
The Egracons project’s country reports describe grading practices in all European countries with HEIs that take part in Erasmus mobility, and probably beyond that area at a later stage. HEI’s take part on a voluntary basis. Detailed explanations of distinctive features and grading cultures per country and institution are provided, including the range of grades, condoning, the average distribution of grades, required overall averages or not, specific bands within grades, differences among disciplines, etc. This allows for a better interpretation of each grading system and hence of the grades suggested by the online tool.
Following the recommendations of UNESCO, the Egracons conversion tool will link degrees to ISCED codes. The ISCED fields of Education and training are used by UNESCO/Eurostat/OECD to classify degrees into disciplines. A new classification was agreed upon in 2013 by Unesco. The ISCED-2013 F classification comprises about 80 fields of education (detailed level = four digits). The detailed fields (the third hierarchical level of the classification) are intended mainly for use at the tertiary level of education (see manual). If you want to code at a higher level, one or two digits ‘8’ are added. In this way 4 digits can be used at all times.
