Image via Denniz Futalan via pexels.com    Philippines offers a fascinating alternative to traditional education known as the Expanded Tertiary Education Equivalency and Accreditation/ETEEAP. This is an educational assessment strategy under the Commission of Higher Education (CHED) that recognizes knowledge, skills, and prior learning through formal, non-formal, and informal training. This comprehensive educational assessment program recognizes and provides equivalencies for knowledge, experiences, achievements, and skills obtained by academic and non-academic work.   Specific higher education institutions in the Philippines are deputized by CHED to offer some select programs through ETEEAP, which is also locally known as prior or adult learning....

Image source: Anete Lusina via pexels.com This final blog posts will briefly examine a few remaining calendars in use today that don’t follow the Gregorian calendar or use slight modifications. In fact, each of these calendars has a vastly unique starting date, usually based on religious reasons, much like the Gregorian calendar. Iran uses the Persian calendar, also known as the Iranian calendar or Jalaali calendar. This solar calendar is used only in Iran now, but from 2001 to 2022, Afghanistan also used the Persian calendar. However, the Taliban implemented the Hijri lunar calendar, which had also been used during...

  Image credit: Samer Daboul via pexels.com     In our previous blog post, we discussed the Gregorian calendar and countries that use it or variations of the Gregorian calendar for their country’s date system. Next time, we’ll discuss countries that follow their own system and might or might not include Gregorian dates on their official records. Before we do that, however, we’re going to briefly discuss the backgrounds of the calendar systems to explain a bit more about how different calendars can vary so much, not just in start dates as we’ve already seen but in the number of days,...

Image source: Tara Winstead via pexels.com   Let’s talk about calendars! If you’re newer to international credentials evaluation or conduct most of your evaluation work from documents translated into your own language, you may be unaware of the importance of understanding and reading dates as they appear on academic records in the local language and calendar system. Dates–from birth dates to enrollment dates to graduation dates–are important for a number of reasons. They help us get a better feel for the applicant’s age at start and end dates, they set our expectations for the duration of a program, and they...

Image source: Kelly M Lacy via Pexels.comIn Brazil, both higher education institutions and the programs they offer must have reconhecimento (recognition) by the Ministry of Education and be listed in the register of recognized programs. Recognized programs lead to the award of national titulos (titles) that are legally recognized as part of the formal higher education system. At the graduacao (undergraduate) level, this is fairly straight-forward. Generally, undergraduate studies in Brazil are not too difficult to research on the Ministry of Education e-MEC website for the Cadastro Nacional de Cursos e Institucoes de Educacao Superior Cadastro (National Registry of Higher...