Zhuanke, zhuanshengben and a benke without a degree certificate: how Canadian ECA agencies name and document Chinese credentials

For almost every source country, a Canadian ECA agency’s country page tells you which office at your university has to send an envelope. For China it does not. Both agencies that publish a Chinese document page route the post-secondary documents through a national verification centre instead, and ICES makes it compulsory in terms:

“Applicants ordering post-secondary official documents from China for ECA purposes must go through one of the following two centres for verification.”

The second thing worth noticing is quieter and more useful. The categories printed on those forms are more granular than the bachelor’s/master’s split people expect. Both agencies name, as distinct document cases, the sub-degree qualification, the upgrading route from it, and the case where someone graduated from an undergraduate programme without receiving a degree certificate.

Read on 3 September 2026. This page reports published document rules; it does not say what any qualification is comparable to in Canada.

The categories the agencies themselves print

ICES, under Post-Secondary Education for China, lists these as separate cases:

• Zhuanke graduates (大专毕业生)
• Zhuanke-to-Benke upgrading graduates (专升本毕业生)
• Benke graduates who did not obtain a Bachelor’s degree (未获得学士学位的本科毕业生)
• Bachelor’s graduates (学士学位毕业生)
• Master’s graduates (硕士学位毕业生)
• Ph.D. graduates (博士学位毕业生)

CES organises the same territory around the two Chinese documents rather than around the student: it asks separately for the Degree Certificate (学位证书) — bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral — and for the Graduation Certificate (毕业证书), whose examples include “Zhuanke graduation certificate (大专毕业证书)” and “Benke graduation certificate without degree certificate (本科毕业证书未获得学士学位证书)”.

That is the single most important structural fact on this page, and it is entirely published: in the Chinese system the graduation certificate and the degree certificate are two different documents, and the Canadian agencies are built around that distinction. Someone who completed an undergraduate programme but did not receive a degree certificate is not an edge case being squeezed into a form — they have their own named line on both forms.

What neither agency publishes is what any of those six categories is compared to. That is decided inside each organisation, under policies the national framework expressly does not standardise: it “respects the autonomy of organizations; and is not prescriptive.”

The verification requirement, and what it changes

ICES names two centres — the Center for Student Services and Development under the Ministry of Education, and the higher-education student information network that operates the online verification service — and states that this route is compulsory for ECA purposes, with a carve-out: “General applicants who require official documents, may choose to have the documents sent directly by the institution instead.”

CES requires verification reports as its own numbered document class: “Verification reports in English or Chinese for: Degree certificate; Graduation Certificate (see note); Academic Records”, to be supplied as “Original verification reports or Official electronic verification reports sent to” its transcripts address. For a degree-programme applicant it names the specific reports it wants: a degree certificate credential report and a verification report of the academic transcript, both from the national centre.

Three consequences follow, and none of them appears in a fee table:

1. The verification report is a separate purchase from a separate organisation. No designated agency’s fee page includes it, and every one of them states that document costs are the applicant’s. The full picture of what an ECA costs beyond the headline fee is in what an ECA actually costs.
2. It moves the bottleneck out of your university. Every agency starts its published processing clock when documents are complete; for China the pacing item is the verification centre, not a registrar. See ECA processing times by agency.
3. You need reports for the right documents. CES asks for verification of the degree certificate, the graduation certificate and the academic records — three items, not one. Ordering only the degree verification is the common and expensive mistake.

Documents and translation

Both agencies want the Chinese originals as well as translations. ICES: “complete original transcript in Chinese and certified English or French translations”, adding “In most cases, translations done by a notary public in China are acceptable.” CES asks for “Academic Records in Chinese (中文成绩单)” as a scanned colour copy, and accepts verification reports “in English or Chinese”.

The general rules that bite here are the ordinary ones: none of the five provides translation, and each publishes its own standard for who may translate. IQAS requires “a word-for-word translation” by “a qualified professional translator who does not need to be certified in Canada”, and says translations “do not need to be certified or notarized”. ICAS requires the translator’s “complete contact information including an e-mail address”.

Two general rules that decide most sub-degree cases

Neither is China-specific, and both matter more than any country page for anyone holding a shorter award.

• The length floor. ICES: “The credential must be at least comparable to one-year of full-time study.” Below that, the question of comparability is never reached.
• The combination rule. IRCC’s published table has a box for “Two or more certificates, diplomas, or degrees”, and all 52 rows in it begin “Three-year or more certificate, diploma, or degree plus a…”. IRCC states the rule in prose as well: “To get full points for more than 1 credential, at least 1 of the credentials must be for 3 or more years of study”, and “The order that you complete your credentials does not affect points.”

For anyone who completed a sub-degree programme and then an upgrading route, those two sentences are the ones to read carefully — with the reminder that IRCC’s table maps the wording of your report, not the name of your programme, and nobody can tell you in advance which wording you will receive. The table’s structure is set out in the 152-row grid read line by line.

Where you studied has to be on the paper

If your programme was delivered somewhere other than the awarding institution’s own campus — a cooperative programme, a branch arrangement, a distance route — ICAS applies a global rule that matters here: “If you did not study on-campus at the institution which awarded your qualification, your documents must clearly indicate the location of study.” Where the delivery mode itself is the question, see online and distance degrees, and for degrees taught in one country and awarded in another, how Canadian ECA rules handle it.

The public guide, and its own disclaimer

IQAS publishes an International Education Guide for China, one of 19 countries. It is the nearest thing to a public Canadian comparison document for Chinese qualifications, and its own terms rule it out as an answer for an individual:

“These are not official IQAS assessments. The recommendations in these guides are for your information only. The credential comparisons represent common educational patterns within each country. They do not take into account the recognition status of the institution through which a credential was obtained, the authenticity of the documentation, or the particular pattern of education followed by an individual.”

The guides also state what they contain — country overview, school and higher education systems, grading scales, documentation, and “IQAS’ suggested credentials comparisons” — and that credential templates give “recommendations on how the credential compares to educational standards in Alberta”. A provincially benchmarked recommendation, published with a disclaimer that it ignores institution recognition and individual study patterns, is not a prediction and should not be used as one.

What to do with this

1. Identify which of the six named categories you are in, using your actual certificates rather than an English job-title translation of your qualification.
2. Check whether you hold both a graduation certificate and a degree certificate. The Canadian forms are built around having both, one, or a specific combination, and the answer changes what you order.
3. Order verification reports for every document class the agency lists, not only for the degree, and budget the time and the fee as a separate item.
4. Keep the Chinese originals. Both published pages want the original-language documents alongside any translation.
5. If your study location differed from the awarding institution, get that stated on the record before you order anything.

What this page does not do

It does not say what a zhuanke, an upgrading-route benke, a benke without a degree certificate or any Chinese degree is comparable to in Canada. It does not reproduce any agency’s comparison table. And it does not calculate Express Entry points, which are awarded by IRCC on the wording of a report that does not exist yet.