Electronically verified attachments

When applying through the joint application procedure for bachelor’s and master’s programmes or the English-language bachelor’s programme application procedure you can submit your educational documents through electronic credential services or through the verification services of educational institutions.

If your home institution uses an electronic credential service or there is a national register service that allows you to share your official educational documents, please use that service to share your educational documents directly from the service to the University of Helsinki.

Select the University of Helsinki from the service's list of registered recipients or, if the service requires a contact email address for sharing, use following contact addresses:

Please refer to your institution’s own instructions for more details on how to access the service that your institution uses. University of Helsinki is unable to assist you in using your home institution’s services.

Below is a list of some common electronic document services that are accepted by the University of Helsinki Admission Services:

If your institution uses a service that is not listed here, please contact us, and we will investigate whether we can accept your documents through this service as well. Please note that the University of Helsinki reserves the right to make the final decision on whether a service is accepted or not.

Electronically signed educational documents

We accept documents that have been electronically signed with a valid digital signature (so called Adobe blue ribbon) by the awarding institution. A valid digital signature appears as a blue ribbon when the document is opened in Adobe Reader. The signature must be issued by the awarding institution, and the signature must be valid when the document is opened.

The University of Helsinki reserves the right to evaluate each digitally signed document case by case and reject documents that do not meet the requirements.

Electronically verified educational documents

We accept electronic educational documents that contain a verification code that we can use to verify the document and its contents using an electronic verification service used by the degree awarding institution.

The following requirements must be for the the verification to be accepted:

  • the verification service is located on the degree awarding institution's website OR, in case of third party services, the institution provides a link to the service on their website
  • the entire document can be verified using the service, i.e. the verification service must show the exact same content as the document you submitted

Please note the following restrictions:

  • Institutional verification services that require downloading specific software or paying for the verification are not accepted.
  • Verification services that rely on the recipient to send an email to the verification service or the issuing institution are not accepted.
  • We cannot guarantee that we can accept verification services in languages other than English, Finnish or Swedish. If the service is available only in other languages, we will try our best to use the service. However, if we are unable to use the service due to it being in another language, you must submit your documents via some other accepted method.
  • If the electronic document verified by the service is not available in English, Finnish or Swedish, you must submit an official translation of the original document as well.
  • Regular PDF scans of educational documents are not accepted if the document cannot be verified using an electronic verification service on the institutions website.

The University of Helsinki reserves the right to evaluate each electronic document and verification service case by case. If we cannot verify the required information, you must submit the document via some other accepted method.

Note! Only for master's programmes.

Note! You must have submitted your application and received an application number before using this delivery method.

If your institution does not use any electronic credential services (such as Digitary, Parchment, MyEquals, CSSD/CHESICC, Truecopy etc.) to share official educational documents, you may ask that your institution sends your official electronic educational documents by email directly to the University of Helsinki to the following email address:

In order for the document to be accepted, certain requirements must be met:

  • The email must be sent from the issuing institution’s official institutional email account
  • The sending email must be verifiable on the institution’s public website
  • The sending email must belong to a person or office that is responsible for issuing official educational documents, for example: registrar’s office, controller of examinations, awards and graduation department etc.
  • The attached document must be in PDF format
  • The email must include your application number as a reference number

Documents sent by email that do not meet the above requirements are not accepted. Please give the above instructions to your institution's representative when requesting that they send your documents.