Degree, Accreditation and Grading

Joint examination will rely partly on mutual recognition of the quality of the partners. Thus, the consortium will incorporate the features of existing courses and local regulations will apply for student’s evaluation and student-teacher conflict resolution. Nevertheless, an effort has been made to establish a procedure as uniform as possible for examination and assessment of student’s achievements.

All courses will be evaluated using local marking, except the Big Data Seminar course of the second semester, that will be jointly evaluated by all partners during the summer school. In case of failure of a course, a resit session will be organised, whenever possible, at least two weeks after the first examination. If the student is already in the partner of the next mobility period, this partner will provide conditions (room, invigilating) to allow the student to resit the examination according to the material provided by previous partner and will be responsible for returning the completed material to the previous partner for evaluation. At the end of each year, the Executive Board of BDMA reviews and discusses the students’ results, compares it to minimum criteria (i.e., passing all courses, or all but one and compensating this with excellence in the others), and decides on a case-by-case basis whether a student can be accepted into the second year or obtain the diploma (depending on whether the course belongs to the first or second year). As stated in the Student’s Agreement, students who did not reach minimum criteria will have to leave the programme. The grading process will be reviewed regularly to ensure that similar grades across partners reflect similar student performance. Upon completion of the programme, student’s grades will be issued in the ECTS grading scheme.

The master’s thesis will be written and publicly defended in English, and will contain a summary in the local language of the university of the specialisation. The thesis defence will take place during the final event and will last for at most 60 minutes, including questions. The jury that will evaluate the thesis is composed of three lecturers from the main partners, two of which are from a partner institution different from the one in which the student did his/her work. Each member of the jury will asses the dissertation beforehand, and the advisor will write a report based on a given form. Considering the assessments made, the advisor’s report, and the oral presentation the jury will agree on a final mark. Grade harmonisation across students will be performed in a common session gathering all jury members. In case of failure of the defence, a resit session will be organised at least two months and at most six months after the first defence. The members of the jury who evaluated the thesis will communicate in writing to the student the aspects of the thesis that must be improved prior to its resubmission. A new defence of the thesis can then be organised, possibly through video-conference, in front of the same jury. If the student fails the defence again, he/she will have to leave the programme.