Recognition of Applicant’s University/Bachelor Education

Under Czech law, students who have obtained their Bachelor (or Master’s) degree abroad are required to obtain an official document to say that their degree is recognised in the Czech Republic, before they can register for a Master degree program at a Czech university.

In common with many other countries, the Czech Republic has signed a number of international agreements regarding the mutual recognition of academic titles, and the specific conditions that apply to any particular diploma will depend to some extent on the specific agreement that has been signed with the country concerned. In general, however, the student must find a Czech university which teaches the same (or an equivalent) subject to the one they studied. They then apply to the relevant Czech university for recognition of their diploma.

Applications for recognition/nostrification should be made in the first instance to a Czech Faculty (or School) which has an equivalent degree program, and they must contain the following:

• A formal written request, including the student’s current contact information, in which the student asks for his/her diploma to be recognised.
  Application form for nostrification/recognition of previous university/bachelor education
• A legalized copy of the student’s foreign diploma – the authenticity of signatures and stamps on the original must be verified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the country where you studied or by a notary of the country and the competent Czech Embassy/Consulate if there is no international agreement between the states.  
• An academic transcript confirmed by the university where you studied – it must include a list of all courses completed during the bachelor study, ETCS credits or allocated number of class hours per week for all courses in the list, grades in all courses in the list, a grading scale.

After it receives the student’s application, the Faculty assesses his/her documents and makes a recommendation to the Rectorate. A final decision on whether or not to issue a nostrification is then made by the Rector.

The nostrification of the student’s earlier studies does not have to be carried out by the same Faculty (or even the same University) as the one where the student now wishes to study. What is important is that the Faculty in question has a degree program equivalent to the one that the student studied abroad. It is also important that the Faculty has the same kind of degree program as the one that the student has previously studied (i.e. it is not possible to seek recognition for a Bachelor degree from a university which does not offer Bachelor degree programs at all). Information about the programs offered by individual faculties and universities are available on their web pages.

Please note. The nostrification is needed only by students who wish to register at a Czech university for a degree program. It is not needed by visiting students. In theory, the recognition process should be completed by students before they register for their first day of classes in September. In practice this is very complicated. We will therefore register all successful applicants provisionally for the first semester, while they work on their paper. But we recommend all Master degree applicants to start working on the recognition of their bachelor diploma at the same time that they apply for admission to our degree programmes. If you do not succeed in this procedure before the registration into the 1^st year, you will have to sign a special declaration confirming that you will provide us with these documents by the end of the first semester.