European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System

ECTS credits originated within the European Union's Erasmus Programme in 1989 as a method of transferring credit earned during study abroad back to students' home institutions; since 2015 it has been part of the EHEA. ECTS originally included a standard ECTS grading scale, intended to be shown in addition to local (i.e., national) standard grades, but this was dropped in 2009 in favour of institutions instead providing a grade distribution table showing the statistical distribution of grades in their national or institutional system. ECTS credits describe the volume of learning, with the level of learning being defined by institutional systems that are referenced to national qualifications frameworks and international frameworks such as the EHEA's Framework for Qualifications of the European Higher Education Area and the EU's European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning.

Current systems