As with assessment, accreditation is currently a major issue as regards residence abroad. The widespread introduction of credit-rated modular systems has meant that a compulsory period abroad either has to be left out of the calculations on which an award is based, with a consequent loss of motivation in the students, or has to have reliable assessments of clearly defined assignments or learning outcomes on which a stated amount of credit can be based. In a four-year course in which the activities undertaken abroad arise out of and feed back into the academic and educational progression represented by the course as a whole, it would be reasonable to expect the period abroad to attract the same amount of credit as any other equal proportion of the student's effort. That is rarely the case, however.

The HEFCE QA overview report on the Iberian languages noted the "virtual absence of significant curricular integration and accreditation links with foreign institutions by Iberian providers." At the RAM workshops in 1998, the institutions represented varied greatly as regards the weighting they put upon the period abroad in the final degree result, from 33% (one year out of three) or 25% (one year out of four) to one unit out of nine or ten. Participants complained that "accreditation of residence abroad does not fit easily into rigid systems of accreditation imposed by administrators." Many institutions are struggling to find an appropriate system which will reflect the importance of the period abroad and give credit for work undertaken while maintaining the rigour associated with the accreditation of the other elements of the course.

The problems involved in setting up such a system are certainly real: establishing parity between different kinds of work, ensuring satisfactory control of plagiarism, finding equivalences for marks awarded by a range of foreign universities or for evaluations given by employers. The difficulty of finding solutions has led many HEIs to limit severely the amount of credit attached to the period abroad and, in some cases, to link it to the accreditation of other years of the course, thereby effectively giving no credit for much of what has been learned during the period abroad.