Last Friday morning, the President of the Ordem dos Psicólogos (OPP), Telmo Mourinho Baptista, was present at Parliament, in the discussion of the petition from the National Council of Professional Orders (CNOP) that defends the equivalence of Masters to holders of previous degrees with 5/6 years of training, in the designation «Bologna pre-reform».

Before the introduction of the «Bologna process», four or five years of attending a Higher Education course qualified students giving them a degree level and the attendance of another two complementary years, the masters level. The Bologna process reduced the total number of years needed to obtain these two academic levels, but maintained the designations.

Telmo Mourinho Baptista defends that it is necessary to «pay attention to the public tenders who are leaving out former graduates, due to the current Masters, even though, in both cases, all attended the same number of years of Higher Education».

Therefore, those who graduated before this alteration have the same number of years of Higher Education as those with Masters in the current «post-Bologna» system. The State, however, does not recognise this comparison, which is why CNOP sent the document to Parliament.

The petition «Equivalence for Masters to former graduates with 5/6 years of training» collected approximately 50 thousand signatures on the site www.peticaopublica.com.