Aarhus University Seal

Equivalence assessment

Access to the graduate school’s PhD programme requires a Danish Master’s degree (“kandidatgrad”) of 120 ECTS credits or a similar relevant five-year degree programme. If you apply for an Integrated PhD programme, you need a Bachelor’s Degree equivalent to a Danish level.

If you do not have a Danish degree, your education will be assessed by the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education when you apply for a PhD.

Please note, that international one-year Master’s degrees are not equivalent to a Danish Master’s degree of 120 ECTS (two years full time).

For more information, please see the Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s general assessments for specific countries.

E.g. does the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education assess a British Master’s degree of 180 credits/units as equivalent to 60 ECTS i.e. one year of a Danish Master’s degree.

How to get your degree assessed

If you are preparing an application for enrolment together with a main supervisor and would like to have your degree assessed, you can send us your examination papers, and we will have them assessed.

Send your Bachelor’s degree and your Master’s degree diplomas and your transcripts of records to graduateschoolhealth@au.dk. The documents must be in the original language accompanied by a certified translation into Danish or English. The documents are sent to the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education for assessment.

If you have a Chinese Master’s degree, please remember to include your CDGDC report together with your Bachelor's degree and Master's degree diploma and transcripts of records (in Chinese and English) in order to get your degree assessed. The report can be in Chinese. 

To shorten the processing time, you can also apply for an assessment directly from the Agency yourself.  When you apply for the PhD, you upload the assessment with the rest of the documents.

If the Agency approves your degree as equivalent to a Danish Master’s degree, the graduate school approves your degree as qualifying without further processing.

If your education is not equivalent to a Danish degree

If the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education does not assess your degree equivalent to a Danish Master’s degree, the Graduate School can assess whether your combined qualifications are equivalent to a Danish Master’s degree and qualifies you to apply for enrolment.

The Graduate School will make an overall, concrete, individual assessment of your application based on the requirement for a relevant five-year degree and on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of documented activities.

During an individual assessment weight will be assigned to for example ECTS points on master’s degree level with relevance for a PhD at The Graduate School of Health, first authorships or co-authorships on publications (published or accepted) in peer reviewed journals/magazines, and special/specific competences/skills with relevance to a PhD programme (e.g. relevant scientific methods or work experience).

Please contact the Graduate School of Health at graduateschoolhealth@au.dk  for more information. 

A Danish degree of less than 120 ECTS credits

If you have a Master’s degree of less than 120 ECTS credits but have major research-relevant activities on your CV it is also a possibility for you to apply for an equivalence assessment.