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1. ECTS (the European Credit Transfer System)

 The ECTS System developed by the European Commission in order to provide common procedures to guarantee academic recognition of studies abroad. It provides a way of measuring and comparing learning achievements and transferring them from one institution to another.

This system, facilitating academic recognition by means of efficient mechanisms of general application, is a code of good practice in the organisation of academic recognitions, based on the transparency of study plans and on the results obtained by the students. The systems do not regulate contents, structures or equivalences of study plans, since issues related to teaching quality should be decided by their own universities when they define their study plans and curricula.

The ECTS system is based on three main elements: information  on study programmes and students achievements;  mutual agreement  between the partner institutions and the student, and finally the use of ECTS credits indicating the student workload. These three elements are operacionalized through the use of three key documents: Information Package, Aplication Form / Learning Agreement and Transcript of Records.

Remember that one semester is worth 30 ECTS credits and one year 60 ECTS credits.

2. ECTS Grading System

The ECTS grading scale is a grading system defined in the ECTS framework by the European Commission. Since many different 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 in order to provide a common currency and facilitate the transfer of students and their grades between European higher education institutions, by allowing the different national and local grading systems to be interchangeable. Grades are reported on a carefully calibrated and uniform A–F scale combined with keywords and short qualitative definitions. Each institution make their own decision on how to apply the ECTS grading scale to their own system.

The ECTS grade is not meant to replace the local grades, but to be used optionally and additionally in order 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.

3. ECTS Information Package (International Student Guide)

UTL Information Package, in Portuguese and in English, is a tool that wishes to provide  to all Partner Higher Education Institutions, their Teaching Staff and Students, all the necessary information to help the students who intend to choose UTL.