Exchange students experience at the Buenos Aires University, School of Engineering

Five years ago the School of Engineering opened an office to handle the needs of exchange students. Buenos Aires University has more than 400 agreements with universities in 42 countries, but often the applicant is from another university. In an interchange agreement a reversal of tuitions is agreed so the students continue to pay their tuition in the university of origin. For more than fifty years the state universities in Argentina have been free of charge for undergraduate students, so no fees are demanded from foreign students. The university accepts students for undergraduate courses with the only requirement of having a secondary school degree. There are several problems to solve: differences of calendar in both universities, idiomatic barriers and different working habits, and marking systems. In this presentation the results so far, the organization previous to the exchange, the difficulties encountered, and the means to solve them are laid out, as well as the personal experience of the authors with two foreign students who attended their classes.