ECTS calculator

In Austria, 25 hours of work. Not 25 hours of lectures: 25 hours of everything the course asks of you, lectures and labs and reading and assignments and revision and the exam added together. That figure is set in law, along with 1500 hours and 60 credits for a full year.

Elsewhere in the European Higher Education Area a credit can be worth anything from 25 to 30 hours, so the same course is worth slightly fewer credits in some countries than it is here.

• Austrian Federal Ministry, ECTS system

Share of your year, unless you cannot. It needs two numbers you can read off your own curriculum, and it does not care what a credit means at your university, because it works out what fraction of a year the course was and prices that fraction at 60 ECTS.

Use the workload method when your curriculum publishes total student hours rather than credits, which some programmes do. Do not use it with contact hours alone. Most of the work behind a credit is the studying nobody puts on a timetable, and counting only the timetabled part will undercount you badly.

Then the workload method is the one you have. Add up the real hours a course took, including the private study, and divide by 25.

If your curriculum gives contact hours only, ask the department what it assumes for preparation and self-study. Many programmes have a figure even when they do not publish it, and a number from the department is worth far more in an application than one you estimated yourself.

No, and neither can anything else, because the scale that would do it no longer exists. The ECTS grading scale that sorted students into A to E was replaced by grade distribution tables in the 2009 ECTS Users' Guide, and the 2015 guide kept that position.

A distribution table is specific to one institution and one subject. It says what share of real students received each local grade, so a receiving university can see where you sat among your peers rather than guessing from a number whose scale it does not know.

So any site that turns 8.4 CGPA into a European letter is quoting something withdrawn over fifteen years ago. What travels is your transcript, and, if your university will issue one, a statement of how grades were distributed in your cohort.

• European Commission, on grade conversion

Treat it as preparation, not as an entitlement. Between universities inside the EU and EEA, examinations carrying the same or nearly the same ECTS have to be recognised. A degree from India is not in that group.

There, an Austrian university recognises examinations by formal decision, one at a time, on whether the content and the workload are equivalent to the course in its own curriculum. This page tells you which of your courses are worth putting forward and what to write in the credit column. The decision is still someone else's.

Two sources, and nothing else. The Austrian figure of 25 hours a credit and 1500 hours a year comes from the ministry. The definition of 60 credits as one full-time year, and the 25 to 30 hour range across Europe, comes from the ECTS Users' Guide.

• Austrian Federal Ministry, ECTS system
• ECTS Users' Guide