The “new” official university degrees will be structured in three cycles.  Each cycle will lead to a degree.

The first cycle leads to a bachelor’s degree, while the second and third cycles lead to a master’s degree and a doctorate, respectively.  As the diagram below shows, master’s degrees and doctorates are both part of the postgraduate offering.

 

The new bachelor’s degrees replace the diplomas, engineering degrees and undergraduate degrees currently available.  All first-cycle degrees will be bachelor’s degrees from September 2010.  The new degrees are designed to ensure that students receive sufficient training to enter qualified employment or pursue postgraduate training.

The second cycle leads to the acquisition of a master’s degree.  While bachelor’s degrees are generalist in orientation, master’s degrees provide additional specialized training.  The new master’s degrees, unlike the master’s degrees offered to date, will be official.  They will be formally recognized throughout Spain and in other European countries, and their fees will be publicly regulated by the Generalitat of Catalonia.

The third cycle provides the student with advanced training in research techniques leading to a doctorate.  Anyone wishing to obtain a doctorate must complete a doctoral thesis in addition to the training acquired through one or more master’s degrees.  Which one or more master’s degrees are necessary to undertake a thesis will be determined by the doctoral program involved.  The duration of a doctorate depends on the time needed to complete the thesis. 

The new degrees are structured in ECTS credits to distinguish them from the credits that have been used to date.  The most important consideration is that a credit has been equivalent to 10 classroom hours, regardless of how many hours of study and other work outside the classroom were necessary, while ECTS credits reflect all the work done by students.  

As a result, an ECTS credit is equivalent to 25-30 hours of student work, including:

• Taught classes, theoretical or practical.
• Personal study time, e.g. in the library or at home
• Participation in seminars, projects, and practical and written assignments.
• Time for preparing and sitting exams and assessment exercises.

With this in mind, the EHEA bachelor’s degrees will be planned on the basis that an academic year is equivalent to 60 ECTS credits for a full-time student.  In other words, the workload for a full-time student (including all work) totals 1,500-1,800 hours.

The bachelor’s degrees will be grouped in five broad areas of knowledge: 

• Arts and Humanities
• Engineering and Architecture
• Health Sciences
• Sciences
• Social Sciences

Each of these degrees must be offered within one of these areas of knowledge.

To obtain an EHEA bachelor’s degree, a student must accumulate a total of 240 ECTS credits.  For some bachelor’s degrees, such as Medicine, Pharmacy and Dentistry, the number of credits required to obtain a degree are higher. 

In general, the new curricula are structured in study areas and each area may contain one or more that one subject.  There are three types of subject:

• basic training subjects
• compulsory subjects
• optional subjects

For all the new undergraduate degrees, the curriculum will have at least 60 credits in basic training subjects.  Although basic training subjects are also compulsory, they are different from compulsory subjects because any credits earned can be recognized if a student decides to change to another bachelor’s degree program offered in the same "offered in the same "branch of knowledge".  Recognition depends on the broad areas of knowledge to which the two degrees are affiliated.

In addition, all bachelor’s degree courses will require a final project worth between 6 and 30 credits, depending on the course.  Some courses may also include compulsory or optional external work placements in companies or institutions. Work placements can correspond to a maximum of 60 credits.   

For more detailed information on the study areas and subjects, the credits assigned to each one, the possibility of external work placement, and the credits assigned to the final project, students must consult each degree’s curriculum.    
For any clarification or more specific questions, students can write to oce@ub.edu

Quality assurance in the framework of the EHEA

The commitment to transparency demanded by our university institutions in the framework of the European Higher Education Area—in accordance with the standards and guidelines for quality assurance described by the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) in their report Standards and Guidelines for Quality assurance in the European Higher Education Area and in line with the current design and implementation procedures for university degree qualifications set out in  Spanish Royal Decree 1393/2007, 29 October, which concerns the organization of official university degree courses, the universities must be able to guarantee that their activity in the area of degree studies answers the learning objectives proposed in those studies.

According to this decree, the universities shall be responsible for designing and proposing course curricula in the manner that they consider will maximize the learning potential in each of their degree offerings and adequately tailor these offerings with the interests and resources of the faculties and schools that teach them. For this reason and in contrast to the past, the curriculum design of a new degree course must be accompanied by descriptions not only of its educational content but also of the learning objectives responsible for that content, and details on the particular procedures by which prospective students are to be admitted to the course, details on the planning and calendar of the course, the resources that have been made available for its study, the results of different kinds that have been forecasted for the course and, finally, the system of quality assurance that it will adopt.

By law, therefore, every university faculty or school offering a particular degree course must be able to ensure that this offering meets specific quality standards. Each faculty or school must have both the formal mechanisms to periodically approve, monitor, review and improve that quality and be able to deliver an adequate body of course material for the purposes of the accreditation that it will be required to have.

Quality assurance systems

Considerations of design

The University of Barcelona (UB) upholds a long tradition in the design and development of cross-institutional mechanisms to ensure the internal quality of its degree course offerings.

In line with this tradition, since 1996 the UB has implemented a series of measures to evaluate and improve its offerings by incorporating features of the national university quality assessment plans the 'Plan Nacional de Evaluación de la Calidad de las Universidades' and the 'II Plan de Calidad de las Universidades', as well as the evaluation program the 'Programa d'Avaluació Institucional' as offered by the Quality Assurance Agency of Catalonia (AQU-Catalunya). Since 2005, the university's proposed offerings in official postgraduate degree courses have also been subjected to a process of verification before being officially offered to students. And beyond degree courses, since the end of the 1990s the UB has also applied quality management tools and procedures related to organizational excellence to gauge the operational standards of its services. Finally, since 2003 the UB has been piloting and implementing quality assurance policies in the area of its new teaching staff through the evaluation of teaching and research activity by AQU-Catalunya.

In this way, the construction and development of the University of Barcelona's internal quality framework has brought about the steady and progressive distillation of a culture of quality which has enabled our community to apply consistent and coherent actions, procedures and services in its activity.

The definition and development of our internal quality assurance system, which has been approved by AQU-Catalunya, has taken into consideration the guidelines for the preparation of the new bachelor's and master's degrees established by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the criteria and guidelines for quality assurance in the EHEA promoted by the  European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA).

Monitoring and evaluation

A process of verification that follows the proposal of a degree course enabling this course to be authorized and registered in the Registry of Universities, Centres and Degrees, a process of accreditation that shall be repeated every six years from the date on which the course is initially registered and a process of authorization, in the case of the Catalan universities, by the Catalan government the Generalitat.

For the purposes of both verification and accreditation, the criteria will include a quality assurance system to monitor the implementation of the remaining criteria and the development and delivery of course offerings following the appropriate guidelines.

For this reason, the monitoring and evaluation stage is particularly important to the success of any offering, given that it guarantees the quality of  internal quality assurance systems (IQAS) in centres of learning in higher education in compliance with established guidelines and criteria, and as a preliminary phase in the implementation and certification of a degree qualification.

The University of Barcelona Quality Assurance Agency has officially taken charge of the internal monitoring of all the university's official degree courses.