Abstract:

One of the main consequences of the internationalization process of the education is the mobility of students between education centers of different countries. A key point in the success of mobility programs is that the work done by a student at any university could be easily valued equally across all countries.

However, the grade systems established in each country are different. In fact, grade systems may differ from one institution to another even in the same country. This is the case, for example, in Argentina, where six different scales are used; or in the UK with as many as ten different scales. In these cases it is essential to obtain equivalences between the different grade systems in order to avoid mismatches in the grades of students involved in mobility programs that could lead to a serious impact in their final average score. This is crucial in any competitive process in which one has to compare average scores across all candidates.

This paper presents a general method to obtain equivalences between grades achieved by students in different evaluation systems. This method is based on the percentile distribution of grades in the different systems considered.

An example of the application of this method will be presented, where equivalences will be obtained using as a reference the grade system established by the Spanish Ministry of Education (Law 1125/2003) which provides a numerical scale from 0.0 to 10. Different grade systems corresponding to three countries will be considered: an alphanumeric scale (Italy), a numerical scale (Colombia) and a very short scale considering only three possible values (Cuba).

Keywords:

Grade system, equivalences between different scales, student mobility.