{"id":89346,"date":"2018-09-03T17:13:21","date_gmt":"2018-09-03T15:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=89346"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:23:04","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:23:04","slug":"minister-van-onderwijs-maak-een-einde-aan-nominaal-is-normaal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2018\/09\/03\/minister-van-onderwijs-maak-een-einde-aan-nominaal-is-normaal\/","title":{"rendered":"Minister for Education wishes to end Nominal = Normal"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Minister for Education, Ingrid van Engelshoven, wishes to relax the stringent requirements for first-year students, culminating in the dreaded \u2018binding study advice\u2019. Van Engelshoven wishes universities to require students to obtain 40 of the 60 credits in their first year at university. Since 2012, EUR\u2019s rules have been considerably stricter: if students don’t obtain all 60 credits, they are asked to leave.<\/p>\n

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Minister Van Engelshoven seeks to enact a new law in which the requirements for first-year students are relaxed, so as to reduce the level of psychological pressure experienced by students. However, the Minister (who represents the D66 party) will require a majority of MPs to vote in favour of her proposal. Since the proposal is not part of the coalition agreement, the coalition parties (VVD, CDA, ChristenUnie and D66) are all entitled to make up their own minds about it.<\/p>\n

If the proposal is adopted, the new rule will not enter into effect until the next academic year at the earliest. The Minister hopes that the education institutions will take steps towards relaxing their requirements for first-year students of their own accord before that time.<\/p>\n

Unnecessary failure<\/h2>

\u201cBy requiring students to obtain fifty or sixty credits in order to be allowed to stay after their first year, you are hitting students hard precisely when they are at their most vulnerable, which is at the start of their degree,\u201d Van Engelshoven stated. She believes the requirements are mainly affecting students who are the first in their families to go to university and who are having some difficulty getting used to student life. The Minister also hopes that her proposal will give late bloomers a fighting chance of obtaining a degree.<\/p>\n

The binding study advice issued after Year 1 was introduced to determine quickly whether a student is right for a particular degree programme. Universities use the decision to prevent students from struggling for years and still ending up without a degree.<\/p>\n

Many universities currently require students to obtain more than forty credits in their first year at university. Wageningen University is the only university to require forty credits across the board, and many degree programmes offered by Radboud University Nijmegen come with a 40-credit minimum as well. For its part, EUR has gone the opposite way: apart from medical students, all EUR students must obtain sixty credits in one year in order to be allowed to continue their degree. Several degree programmes offered by Maastricht University also come with a sixty-credit requirement.<\/p>\n

'Astonishing' results at EUR<\/h2>

More about 'N=N'<\/h2>