Secondary school leaving certificates gained abroad are subject to “nostrification”. If an international agreement on recognition of equivalence exists, confirmation of the equivalence is issued. The process of “nostrification” of documents enabling access to higher education is regulated by decrees of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport.
The authorities competent to make decisions on recognition of secondary school leaving certificates in the Czech Republic are:
Regional Education Authorities (School departments of Regional Authorities)
- for recognition of secondary school leaving certificates
- for confirmation of equivalence if there is an agreement on recognition of equivalence between the Czech Republic and the country where the documents were issued (The Czech Republic is bound by a number of bilateral agreements on recognition of equivalence with Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic and other states.)
Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport
- for all questionable cases
Applicants for recognition have to submit:
1) an application for recognition, and
2) legalized copies of documents (certificates, study reports from each study year, full description of all subjects, etc.)
The documents on secondary education must be translated into Czech. The authenticity of the content of the translated documents must be verified by a competent authority.
Legalization
The authenticity of signatures and stamps on original documentation must be verified by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the state which is the seat of the institution that has issued the document or by a foreign notary and the embassy of the Czech Republic in the respective country. Such legalization is not required for documents coming from countries which are parties to a relevant international agreement abolishing the requirement of legalization for foreign public documents.
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. The students will have to sign a special declaration confirming that they will provide us with these documents by the end of the first semester.
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. Download the application form for nostrification/recognition at the bottom of this page.
- 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 1st 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.
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