Academic Recognition

1. Check the list of courses previously available
When considering the various alternatives in terms of schools and destinations, look at the information on the courses offered by the host university (indicated in the Exchange destinations), visit the list of courses taken abroad in the Course history, and read the experience of the former exchange students' reports. 
Where no course information is available, these are new schools, schools reintroduced to the network after a few years, or destinations where there have been no students from your degree program recently.

Please consider that at the Pre-selection stage, it is not possible to know with certainty which courses will be available at the partner schools. In most cases, the updated course offer for your mobility year does not yet exist, and part of the other schools' offerings may not be open to Exchange students, or may have limited seats, or may require academic prerequisites.

2. Check the courses that are forbidden to take abroad

Please consider, that some courses cannot be validated if taken abroad:

• computer tests
• compulsory courses from another specific degree course
• banned courses: see List of compulsory courses which cannot be recognized (see Guide to the University chapter 7.14).

3. It is not necessary to change your Study Plan in advance

In order to give more flexibility in the courses choices, Bocconi students participating in International programs have the possibility to modify their study plan one extra time once back from the exchange through Punto Blu available in the yoU@B student Diary. (see Guide to the University chapter 9.3.4).

1) Check the Academic Offer at the Partner School

The official list of courses available at the partner university will be given after the application to the partner school, according to their schedule. It is your responsibility to look at the course content summaries in the online course profiles and find possible matches with the courses taught at the partner schools through the above-mentioned web tools.

Consider that both courses with and without correspondence (need to be validated), but they involve different administrative procedures for you to follow:

Conversion with correspondence
These conversions have a corresponding course at Bocconi and they will be approved, through the Recognition Platform, by the professor responsible of that specific course at Bocconi. These conversions can be inserted in your Bocconi career as mandatory, elective, or extra-curricular exams (in this last scenario, please always verify on the Guides to the University the Study Plan Office rules for additional educational activities exam insertion).

Conversion without correspondence
These conversions do not have a corresponding course at Bocconi and they will be approved, through the Recognition Platform, by the Program Director who has an overall view of your Study Plan. These conversions can be inserted in your Bocconi career either as elective or extra-curricular exams (in this last scenario, please always verify on the Guides to the University the Study Plan Office rules for additional educational activities).

Credits at the partner School
The Bocconi credits system is based on the ECTS, the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System.
For courses with Bocconi correspondence, after the conversion, you will have in your Study Plan the number of credits assigned to the correspondent Bocconi course; for courses without Bocconi correspondence, the number of credits assigned to a Bocconi elective course (6 cfu). 
Please note that, in many partner schools, especially outside Europe, there might be a different credit system.
Therefore, check within the recognition platform for credit equivalency before making conversion requests.

2) Start inserting your requests
If the exam you want to take abroad is not available on the list on the Recognition Platform you can enter a new request.
In some cases, it is possible that you will find many courses already approved (green flag). If you select these courses you do not need to get any preliminary approval: once back, after you send the recognition request, these courses will be automatically registered into your study plan. (see Sez. Upon return).

Remember that in order to obtain a preliminary approval, for each new request student must send to the professor an overall description of the course you wish to attend abroad. The Bocconi professor has to receive the pdf version of the analytic syllabus of the course (e.g. course description and level - objectives, contents, lectures and/or special workloads, written/oral exam, the number of credits assigned to the course and/or the number of classroom and lecture hours, the local instructor's contacts). 

It is not possible to have validated 1 course taken abroad with 2 Bocconi courses; on the other hand, 2 or more courses taken abroad can be either recognized into 1 Bocconi course, or can be recognized into 1 elective without correspondence.

If you need more information on this procedure please check our video tutorial through B in Touch.

Only at the end of the Exchange, students can finalize the recognition of the exams taken abroad by entering a request through the Recognition platform available in the yoU@B Diary. Please remember that there is no deadline for the recognition procedure, but students need to pay attention to the Study Plan completion date depending on the graduation session they want to join.

The requests can be submitted by students only if the final and official Transcript of Records with grades of the exams taken abroad has been received (electronic version is allowed). Please verify that any procedures for issuing the official Transcript for grades obtained at the host school have been completed.
The time to receive the transcript can vary from school to school and in some cases, it can take months from the end of the term abroad.

For students taking part in the Exchange Program during the Spring Term: consider that the timing of semesters and Transcript release might not be aligned with Bocconi timeline.
Therefore, it may not be possible to graduate in July and/or to be compliant for 2°Round of the applications for MSc program at Bocconi due to the time needed to transfer exams taken abroad.

Students are allowed to send ONLY ONE request for recognition, therefore it is important that this request includes all of the courses that the student may wish to convert from their experience abroad.

Students will be informed via their yoU@B student Diary when the request has been processed.

Please note: students that receive the Transcript at their home address shall upload a copy of it through the Recognition platform, available by the yoU@B student Diary.

Bocconi has worked out differentiated conversion tables (Tabelle di Conversione) for each Partner School in order to ensure fair grade conversion between different academic contexts.

Conversion tables imply a one-to-one correspondence between every Partners grades and a Bocconi one.
They are based on information given by Partner Schools about their grading distribution (percentages, curves of distribution, description of grades and if any Country specifics) and compared to Bocconi grading system.
Being based on such one-to-one association, some Bocconi grades cannot find any correspondence on some Partners' grading scales; therefore, you must be aware that not all the 13 Bocconi grades or the laude (from 18 to 30/30) can be assigned.

After selection, it will be possible to see, through Punto Blu, the conversion table of the school you have been selected for. To access the conversion table from Punto Blu, you can select the "International Mobility" option from the right menu, then choose "Mobility Calls," position yourself, and click on the magnifying glass icon to the right of the "Exchange Program call" while scrolling through the various tabs of the "Call Details."