In a nutshell
Think of ECTS credits as a shared unit for measuring study, a little like a common currency. A course worth five credits in Bologna asks for roughly the same amount of learning as a five-credit course in Kraków or Lisbon.
That makes two everyday things possible. A student can spend a semester abroad and bring the credits home, and a university can read a transcript from another country without guessing what the numbers mean. What credits do not tell you is how well someone did – that is what grades are for.
Sources: [1]
Where ECTS comes from
ECTS – the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System – started in 1989 inside the Erasmus programme. Its first job was practical: to turn the courses a student took abroad into credits that counted towards the degree back home.
Today it is one of the shared tools of the European Higher Education Area. Its rules are set out in the ECTS Users' Guide, which ministers adopted as an official EHEA document at their conference in Yerevan in 2015. That guide replaced the 2009 version.
What a credit measures
A credit expresses two things together: the learning outcomes a course is designed to produce, and the workload a typical student needs to get there. Workload counts everything – lectures and seminars, but also independent study, projects, placements and preparing for exams.
The anchor is the academic year. Sixty credits stand for a full-time year, and a full-time year typically means 1,500 to 1,800 hours of work. That is where the familiar figure of 25 to 30 hours per credit comes from. The guide is careful to add that real students differ: the hours describe a typical learner, not a stopwatch.
Credits are awarded when assessment shows that the learning outcomes have been achieved – not simply for attending.
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Four documents that make it work
The ECTS Users' Guide describes four supporting documents (section 7 of the guide):
- Course catalogue – public information about the institution, its programmes and individual courses, published in advance so that students can choose.
- Learning agreement – a binding agreement between the student, the home institution and the host institution on what the student will study (or do on a placement) abroad.
- Transcript of records – an up-to-date record of a student's progress: the courses completed, their credits and grades.
- Work placement certificate – issued by the host organisation after a placement, describing the tasks, the learning outcomes achieved and an evaluation of the student.
Sources: [1]
Taking credits abroad
Mobility works in two steps (section 4.2 of the guide). Before leaving, the student and both institutions sign the learning agreement. The courses abroad do not have to match the home courses one by one; they should fit the learning outcomes of the home programme.
After returning, once the host institution has issued a transcript of records, the home institution should recognise the agreed credits in full and count them towards the degree – without asking the student to sit extra exams. Where needed, grades are converted using the grade distribution tables described below.
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Credits for what you already know
Credits can also recognise learning gained outside formal courses – at work, through volunteering or by independent study – if it matches the learning outcomes the programme requires (section 5.2). The assessment looks at what the person has learned, not at how long they spent learning it. A portfolio is one common way of showing it.
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What a credit is not
A credit says nothing about performance. Two students who pass the same module receive the same credits, whatever their marks.
National grading scales stay different. To help compare them, the guide asks each institution to publish a grade distribution table showing how its grades are actually used. The old ECTS letter scale from A to E is no longer part of the system.
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Comparing grades across countries
Because credits say nothing about performance, grades travel separately – and every country grades differently. The ECTS Users' Guide solves this with a grade distribution table (section 4.3).
Each institution counts the passing grades actually awarded to a reference group of students in the same field, over at least the last two years, and shows what percentage of students received each grade. When a student comes back from abroad, the person responsible for recognition places the foreign grade in the host institution's table and converts it to the grade in the same position in the home table (section 4.4). Where ranges overlap, the institution decides in advance whether it takes the lower, middle or higher grade. Annex 2 of the guide gives worked examples.
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How many credits make a degree?
The overarching framework of qualifications for the EHEA gives typical ranges for each cycle:
| Cycle | Typical credits |
|---|---|
| Short cycle | 90–120 |
| First cycle (bachelor) | 180–240 |
| Second cycle (master) | 90–120, at least 60 at second-cycle level |
| Third cycle (doctorate) | no common range |
These are outer limits. Each country sets its own rules within them, in its national qualifications framework.
What this means for you
- Students going abroad: sign the learning agreement before you leave and keep your transcript of records – together they are your claim to full recognition.
- Universities: credits should follow the learning outcomes and the real workload of a course, and be described in the course catalogue.
- Employers: credits show the volume of study, not its quality – for performance, look at the grades and the grading table.
Sources: [1]
In Poland
Polish study programmes are described in ECTS credits. The Act on Higher Education and Science sets the minimum a student must collect to graduate (Article 76): 180 credits for first-cycle studies, 90 for second-cycle studies, and 300 or 360 for long-cycle master's studies (9–10 or 11–12 semesters). The national regulation on studies requires every programme to state how many semesters it lasts and how many ECTS credits a student needs to complete it at a given level (§ 3(1)(1)). The same regulation adds one Polish detail: first-cycle and long-cycle master's programmes include at least 60 hours of physical education, and these hours carry no ECTS credits (§ 3(2)).
The regulation does not itself convert credits into hours. That conversion follows the ECTS rules described above: a full-time year is 60 credits, which in most systems means 1,500–1,800 hours of work, so roughly 25–30 hours per credit. A worked example is in the article How many hours of work is one ECTS credit?
Sources
- ECTS Users' Guide 2015
- EHEA – ECTS
- Overarching Framework of Qualifications of the EHEA (2018), Paris Communiqué Appendix III
- EHEA – Qualification Frameworks
- Act of 20 July 2018 – Law on Higher Education and Science (Prawo o szkolnictwie wyższym i nauce), Dz.U. 2018 poz. 1668 as amended; ISAP, unified text as of 16 October 2026
- Dz.U. 2026 poz. 1207 – Consolidated text of the Polish regulation on studies (rozporządzenie w sprawie studiów)
Sources checked on 26 October 2026. Official documents are linked, not republished.