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I received a job offer for a Software Developer position in Germany. I was asked by the German Embassy to get a ZAB assessment of my bachelor's degree in order for them to grant me a work visa. After sending my university documents and contract to the ZAB, they replied with the payment details and an initial review that says:

Eine erste Durchsicht Ihrer Unterlagen hat ergeben, dass es für Ihren Abschluss keine Entsprechung im Hochschulbereich gibt. Nach derzeitigem Stand wird die Bewertung Ihres Abschlusses voraussichtlich auf der Ebene eines deutschen Reifezeugnisses sowie Teilen eines Grundstudiums in Informatik erfolgen.

Bitte überlegen Sie, ob Sie unter diesen Voraussetzungen die Ausstellung einer Zeugnisbewertung wünschen und geben Sie uns eine kurze Rückmeldung, ob wir mit der Bearbeitung Ihres Antrages fortfahren sollen.

Google translation:

A first review of your documentation has shown that there is no equivalent in the higher education sector for your degree. According to the current state, the evaluation of your degree is expected to take place at the level of a German university degree as well as parts of a basic course in computer science.

Please consider whether you would like to receive a certificate evaluation under these conditions and give us a short confirmation as to whether we should continue to process your application.

I am confused with this statement: "there is no equivalent in the higher education sector for your degree". As far as I understand the requirements for Blue card, I need to have an assessment which states that my degree is equivalent to a university degree in Germany.

My university is listed in Anabin with H+ status but my degree is not listed under the university.

Is this initial review normal? Should I just send the a confirmation to continue my ZAB application?

Did I understand correctly that they would compare my bachelor's degree with a German bachelor's degree as I requested in my application? deutschen Reifezeugnisses has different translations in Google, sometimes it means "German school leaving certificate" other times it is "German university degree"

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    Should you continue? Not without trying to clarify why the degree isn't acceptable in the Anabin database. ZAB is planning to try to approve a certification like an associate's degree in the US, not a full bachelor's degree.
    – mkennedy
    Jun 29, 2017 at 18:32
  • @mkenned, I think the embassy asked me to get the ZAB assessment of my bachelor's degree since the Anabin database do not have a record of my degree under my university yet. I'm not sure if the database will get updated if I push through my ZAB application. I'm not sure whether I understand the translation correctly that they would evaluate my bachelor's degree in comparison with a German university degree. I will update the question with the original german letter
    – Frank Smith
    Jun 30, 2017 at 2:46
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    Thank you for adding the German statements. For Reifezeugnisses, I get "school leaving certificate", and an online dictionary says that it's given after passing an Abitur exam. An Abitur exam occurs after 12 or 13 years of schooling, so approximately after US high school. I'm not sure if it applies to O-levels or A-levels in the UK. So, they don't feel that you've completed the equivalent of a German bachelor's degree. I don't feel competent or secure enough to turn this into an answer.
    – mkennedy
    Jun 30, 2017 at 17:25
  • Thanks for the info about Reifezeugnisses. Do you know if this initial evaluation changes after they do their assessment (not sure with their process)? Since they already have all my university documents, (transcript, course description, diploma), I'm thinking of continuing the assessment in hoping to get a comparable result to a German bachelor's degree. Is this worth a shot?
    – Frank Smith
    Jul 1, 2017 at 2:04
  • Which degree you had? and what happened next?
    – Hemant J
    Mar 22, 2018 at 15:32

1 Answer 1

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TL;DR: What ZAB is answering you is that given their initial screening of documents they will most likely not consider your degree equivalent to a German university degree.
That is also why they are asking you whether you really want to proceed with the process, given that the outcome would most likely be unfavorable to you.

Google translate is unable to capture the subtleties of legalese/bureacratic German in their first paragraph:

Eine erste Durchsicht Ihrer Unterlagen hat ergeben, dass es für Ihren Abschluss keine Entsprechung im Hochschulbereich gibt. Nach derzeitigem Stand wird die Bewertung Ihres Abschlusses voraussichtlich auf der Ebene eines deutschen Reifezeugnisses sowie Teilen eines Grundstudiums in Informatik erfolgen.

What the first sentence means, is that for your degree there is no "equivalence" in the university sector and I read that as your degree not being equivalent to a German university degree (not even a bachelors).
The second sentence confirms this, saying that by their preliminary analysis they would most likely classify your degree as equivalent to a university system entrance diploma ("Reifezeugnis", they mean Hochschulreife, which is obtained e.g. by the Abitur in the German education system) and parts of the initial phase ("Grundstudium" = basic study period) of a bachelor course in computer science.

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