MED-NET Conferences 1998, Lille & 1999, Maastricht
Anthology of presentations 7.3.

Credit Points: A proposal for a practicable strategy of allocation

D. Bingmann and R. Greger (Essen, Germany)

Estimations of the workload of courses, a prerequisite for an allocation of CP, inevitably lead to extensive discussions. Nonetheless, the credit points (CP) allocated to comparable courses and workloads will widely differ in different universities. The strategy to avoid such problems often consists of an allocation of one CP to one lecture hour per week (LH) because most medical curricula comprise about 300 LH during ten semesters corresponding to 300 CP.

Such CP, however, cannot inform about the specific workload of courses and are useless if parts of the medical curriculum passed in one university have to be acknowledged by another. Therefore, a commission of the "Medizinischer Fakultätentag" has tried to allocate CP on a "top-down" basis according to

1. demands of the curriculum according to the German regulations of medical education,
2. the percentage of questions covering individual disciplines in central examinations, and
3. the estimated time spent on the different disciplines.

According to the rules of ECTS, a student has to collect 120 CP during four preclinical semesters. To collect these CP he has to pass courses arranged by us in blocks. Such blocks can comprise different disciplines. The 120 CP may be summed up by fifteen CP for compulsory courses in physics, chemistry, biology (block 1), ten CP for courses of medical psychology and medical sociology (block 2), five CP for courses in terminology, introduction into clinical medicine / first contacts to medical professions (block 3) and thirty CP each for anatomy, biochemistry and physiology (blocks 4-6).

Thus, everyone who wherever has passed the whole block of physiology will receive thirty CP. If only a part of physiology -e.g. the practical- has been completed, the corresponding CP may be allocated by the local ECTS co-ordinator or by the teachers involved. Such a strategy, however, has to be discussed to find a broad consensus about such allocation of CP.

ISBN Number 90.805758.1.X

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