Publication of new ISCED codes
Following the recommendations of UNESCO, the Egracons conversion tool will link degrees to ISCED codes. The ISCED fields of Education and training are used by UNESCO/Eurostat/OECD to classify degrees into disciplines. A new classification was agreed upon in 2013 by Unesco. The ISCED-2013 F classification comprises about 80 fields of education (detailed level = four digits). The detailed fields (the third hierarchical level of the classification) are intended mainly for use at the tertiary level of education (see manual ). If you want to code at a higher level, one or two digits ‘8’ are added. In this way 4 digits can be used at all times.
At the highest one-digit level the following 11 broad groups of fields of education are distinguished: 00 Generic Programmes and qualifications 01. Education 02. Humanities and arts 03. Social sciences, journalism and information 04. Business administration and law 05. Natural Sciences, mathematics and statistics 06. Information and Communication Technologies 07. Engineeering, manufacturing and construction 08. Agriculture, forestry and veterinary 09. Health and welfare and 10. Services. Read more here.
The Egracons project proposes that degree programmes (of the same cycle) under the same ISCED study field codes are aggregated to make up one single reference group (discipline) according to a 4-digit code. The grading tables are submitted per degree, but the degrees are combined automatically to ISCED discipline codes inside the tool. This makes it possible to search both by degree title and ISCED code. The choice of the codes is critical because, in order to make the conversion simpler, it should be uniformly applied by HEIs of each country (or educational system of a region). This makes it possible to have a one-to-one correspondence between reference groups of different countries. Comparing grading tables based on individual degree programmes would not offer this correspondence, as they cannot be readily compared, may be statistically unstable and be too dependent on the grading behaviour of individual professors.
Please find Manual about ISCED here and the list of new codes here.
