Credit points at IDE

TU Delft uses the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) to calculate the credit points. Although the ECTS system is a European system, universities in Europe use different ways to calculate the number of ECTS per course.

IDE uses the following principle: we calculate the number of ECTS based on ALL hours that are spent on the course. One academic year is 60 ECTS. In the Netherlands an academic year consists of 42 work weeks of 40 hours each = 1680 hours in total. This means that 1 ECTS equals 28 hours of study. This includes hours that are spent on lectures, exams, supervised training / laboratory / practice, unsupervised group work at the faculty and individual self study at home. We do not use the principle that the number of ECTS is based on the number of lecture hours, which many other foreign institutions do (for example: 4 lecture hours per week = 4 ECTS). Neither do we divide the number of ECTS by the number of courses that are offered during each study year.

Because of the differences in the way ECTS are calculated between universities, it is often difficult to find equivalents between courses of TU Delft and foreign institutes, if one solely looks at the number of ECTS. It is our experience that all exchange students find the study load at IDE much higher than at their home institution. Therefore exchange students usually follow an average of 24 ECTS per semester. With several foreign institutions IDE has agreed that it is acceptable for their students to take approximately 24 ECTS per semester instead of 30 ECTS per semester and that this will not interfere with the conversion of their results at their home university.

Unfortunately we cannot give exchange students their grades directly when they leave. Exchange students are asked to send an e-mail to OSA-io@tudelft.nl when all grades are available on OSIRIS. Transcript of record will be sent to the home institution of the exchange student. This usually takes some time approx. 1-2 months.