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How to construct a study plan

It is important to construct a feasible study plan. This way you can make sure that you get to study the courses you want, your schedule is sensible and that you can transfer the credits you need for your degree. This can be a challenge given that most exchange students come from universities following different semester structures and scheduling systems. The information below will clarify the semester structure in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in LiU and will help you understand how to construct an interesting and realistic study plan.

Full-time courses

They are quite intensive and the expected weekly workload is about 40 hours, including lectures, seminars, individual studying, exam and assignment writing.

Part-time courses

Slower-paced courses, with less workload per week but they last longer than 4 weeks. They have one or two lectures per week and they span over half of or even the whole semester.

Semester structure

  • The semester is divided into four consecutive study periods. Each period lasts for five weeks and corresponds to a 7.5 ECTS full-time course. 15 ECTS full-time courses last 10 weeks and therefore two study periods.
  • You can take only one full-time course per study period but
  • You can combine part-time and full-time courses or several part-time courses that run during the same period.

Study plan

  • Full-time studies and minimum credits per semester are 30 ECTS. You are allowed to take up to 45 ECTS per semester.
  • The period during which the course is given is indicated by the column “weeks”. Please consult this online calendar for the exact dates.
  • To find out whether a course is full-time or part-time, click on the course and scroll down. The terms “Half-time” and “One-quarter-time” indicate that the course is part-time.

Below you can find two examples of how a feasible study plan can look like. Keep in mind that those are just suggestions. More course combinations can be used to construct a viable study plan as long as the principles one full-time course per period and at least 30 ECTS in total are followed.

Make up your timetable

Example of timetable

Make up your timetable

This is two ways of making up your timetable.

Examination and grading

Examination

  • The examination takes place during and at the end of each course. This means that there is no exam period at the end of the semester and that students should expect to have finished with all their courses by the last day of the semester.
  • Regarding the autumn semester, there is a good number of courses that finish their lectures and seminars in December, before the winter break, and give the opportunity to the students to complete the remaining course work and submit it from a distance, without requiring physical presence in Linköping. Nevertheless, this is not possible to know before the schedule for the courses is released in July.

Credits and grading scale

  • Linköping University uses ECTS credits, which express the volume of learning based on the defined learning outcomes and their associated workload. One credit typically corresponds to about 25 hours of work, which includes lectures, seminars, group work, individual study and exam and assignment writing. For example, a 7.5 ECTS course that has a 5-week duration, would have a total workload of 187 hours, which means about 37 hours per week. For a detailed description of the different concepts and how ECTS is used, please see the ECTS users´ guide.
  • Please note that the University does not use the concept of “contact hours” to measure the course´s workload. If you need the hour spent in the classroom to have your courses approved, you can consult the timetable from previous years (select “Historiskt Schema”). Search the course using its code and/or name.
  • Keep in mind, that there is no guarantee that the course will have the same amount of teaching hours or that it will follow the same timetable the coming semester.
  • For the most courses offered to exchange students, the ECTS grading scale is used. Linköping University does not have the possibility to convert the ECTS grades into other universities´ grading scales.
  • A small number of courses offered to exchange students and all courses taught in Swedish (for Swedish speaking students – this does not include the Swedish language courses) use the Swedish grading scale (VG/G/U). Please note that if a course is graded according to the Swedish grading scale, your transcript of records will display only the Swedish grade.

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