All electronic attachments must be uploaded to your Studyinfo application form.

Verified educational documents must be delivered according to the instructions below by the application deadline. Additionally, all applicants must upload copies of their educational documents to the application form.

If your degree was completed in Finland, you do not need to submit verified versions, instead photocopies uploaded to the application form will suffice.

Please scan the original documents with care, always scan in color and remember to scan all pages. If your scan is blurred, discoloured or the file is flawed, it will not be accepted. The use of PDF -format is encouraged, as this ensures that the files can be opened in all operating systems.

It is always the applicant’s responsibility to make sure that the application documents meet the requirements and reach the University of Lapland by the deadline. University of Lapland does not process any application documents that have arrived after the deadline. The authenticity of all documents will be examined and the submission of forged documents will lead to automatic rejection of the applicant.

A degree certificate is a document issued by an institution to a student who has successfully completed all studies comprising the degree. The student has graduated. The degree certificate should include the name of the institution awarding the degree, the date of issue, and the name of the person to whom the degree certificate has been issued and which title/degree the person has been awarded.

A provisional/temporary degree certificate is accepted if it was issued no more than five years earlier. The five-year validity period begins from the date on which the degree was conferred and must not expire prior to the application deadline. It is important to note that a document stating only that the student has completed all the courses is not sufficient as a temporary degree certificate.

A transcript of records should include the following information:

• full titles of the units that the student has completed for the degree
• completion times of study units (or at the very least the overall study time at the institution)
• grades obtained
• credits awarded
• information on the grading scale used at the institution

The transcript must cover the full duration of the student’s studies. If the degree includes course units that the student has completed at another institution and the transferred credits are not indicated in detail on the transcript of records, a separate transcript of records for the transferred credits should be submitted. University of Lapland only accepts official transcripts of records.

If your educational documents are not in Finnish, Swedish or English, you are required to provide authorized translations of the documents in one of these three languages. into one of these languages. Authorized translations can be prepared by the awarding institution or an official translator. Translations done by the applicant are not accepted.

Each page of an official translation must bear the translator’s stamp and/or signature. Official translations must be exact translations of the original documents.

Please note that the translations are required in addition to the original documents, not instead of the original documents.

All applicants including native speakers are required to provide proof of proficiency in either English or Finnish. Please see all accepted ways of proving English proficiency and proving Finnish proficiency.

You may ask that your institution sends your official electronic educational documents by email directly to the University of Lapland to the following email address:

admission@ulapland.fi

In order for the document to be accepted, certain requirements must be met:

• The email must be sent from the issuing institution’s official institutional email account
• The sending email must be verifiable on the institution’s public website
• The sending email must belong to a person or office that is responsible for issuing official educational documents, for example: registrar’s office, controller of examinations, awards and graduation department etc.
• The attached document must be in PDF format

University of Lapland accepts official transcripts submitted electronically through the international transcript services listed below. Please request your electronic transcript to be submitted to admission@ulapland.fi or select the University of Lapland from the list of receivers. Please refer to the services’ own instructions for more details on how to use each service.

• CSSD (https://www.chsi.com.cn/en/)
• Digitary (http://www.digitary.net/)
• Gradintelligence (https://gradintel.com)
• My eQuals (https://www.myequals.edu.au/receiving-documents/)
• National Student Clearinghouse (https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/)
• Parchment Exchange (https://www.parchment.com/)
• Truecopy (http://www.electronictranscripts.com)
• Vitnemålsportalen (https://www.vitnemalsportalen.no/)
• Ladok (https://ladok.se/)

If your institution uses a service not listed here, please contact us at admission@ulapland.fi and we will check if it is possible for us to accept your documents through this service. Please note that the University of Lapland reserves the right to make the final decision on whether a service is accepted or not.

Electronically signed educational documents

We accept documents that have been electronically signed with a valid digital signature (so called Adobe blue ribbon) by the awarding institution. A valid digital signature appears as a blue ribbon when the document is opened in Adobe Reader. The signature must be issued by the awarding institution, and the signature must be valid when the document is opened.

The University of Lapland reserves the right to evaluate each digitally signed document case by case and reject documents that do not meet the requirements.
Send the digitally signed document by email to admission@ulapland.fi

Electronically verified educational documents

We accept electronic educational documents that contain a verification code that we can use to verify the document and its contents using an electronic verification service used by the degree awarding institution. The possibility for verification must be clearly indicated in the document.

The following requirements must be met for the the verification to be accepted:

• The verification service is located on the degree awarding institution’s website OR, in case of third party services, the institution provides a link to the service on their website.
• The entire document can be verified using the service, i.e. the verification service must show the exact same content as the document you submitted to your application.

Please note the following restrictions:

• Institutional verification services that require downloading specific software or paying for the verification are not accepted.
• Verification services that rely on the recipient to send an email to the verification service or the issuing institution or to create a user account are not accepted.
• We do not accept verification services in languages other than English, Finnish or Swedish.
• If the electronic document verified by the service is not available in English, Finnish or Swedish, you must submit an authorized translation of the original document as well.
• Regular PDF scans of educational documents are not accepted if the document cannot be verified using an electronic verification service on the institutions website.

The University of Lapland reserves the right to evaluate each electronic document and verification service case by case. If you are not sure that your service meets the requirements, please submit your documents via some other method.

If you are not able to follow one of the three methods above, you must deliver the documents either according to our country-specific requirements or by following the instructions for officially certified copies below.

Please see if the country in which your degree was awarded has country-specific requirements, and if so, follow the country-specific requirements.

If the country in which your degree was awarded does NOT have country-specific requirements, please follow the instructions for officially certified copied below.

EXCEPTION: For educational documents from mainland China, you must submit certain verification reports. Please see the country-specific requirements for China.

Officially certified copies are accepted only when the degree has been awarded in a country which does NOT have country-specific requirements regarding delivering educational documents.

Note: all the documents provided by the methods below must be delivered as physical (hard) copies to the following address:

University of Lapland
Applicant and Student Services
PO Box 122
FI-96101 Rovaniemi
FINLAND

Officially certified copies issued by a Finnish Notary Public

Officially certified copies issued by a Finnish Notary Public are accepted. Find more information at the website of the Digital and Population Data Services Agency. Copies issued by notaries public in other countries are not accepted without legalisation.

Official certification by the awarding institution

Officially certified copies of academic documents can be issued by the awarding institution. If you request officially certified copies from the awarding institution, make sure that the copies submitted to University of Lapland meet the following criteria:

1. taken directly from your original educational documents
2. include every page of your educational documents
3. bear the original stamp of the awarding institution on each page of the document (e.g. a generic stamp stating only “Certified true copy” will not be accepted)
4. bear the original signature of the certifying officer

Legalisation of documents

If you cannot obtain officially certified copies of your academic documents from the awarding institution, you may submit legalised copies of your academic documents.

Legalisation takes place by two different means depending on whether the relevant country is a signatory to the Hague Convention of 1961. Documents supplied by countries that have ratified the Hague Convention are legalised by the issuance of an Apostille Certificate (stamp or paper certificate). Documents issued by other countries are legalised in two steps: first by the foreign ministry of the issuing country, then by a competent Finnish Embassy or Finnish Consulate of that country.

Apostille

The Apostille Certificate (stamp or paper certificate) is necessary if the document has been issued by the authorities of a country that has ratified the Hague Convention of 1961. Information on the Hague Convention as well as an English language list of its member states can be found here:

Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents

It also provides information about the authorities issuing Apostille Certificates in the various countries.

Legalisation

If the country issuing a document is not a signatory of the Hague Convention, a document is legalised by the foreign ministry of the issuing country, after which a competent Finnish Embassy or Finnish Consulate of that country legalises the document, certifying the competence of that foreign ministry official to issue such legalisation.