Introduction:

The Transferable Credit System was developed to translate student workload into academic credits that are recognized in all countries, aiming at learning achievement. Autonomous learning is an objective that most educational programs promote as a strategic option to connect career, study environment and professional expectations.

Objective:

Analyzing the hours of autonomous work used by students to achieve the learning outcomes determined in the subject programs, their effectiveness in terms of academic performance and their correspondence with what is established in the study plan, adjusted to the Transferable Credit System.

Methods:

A retrospective cross-sectional descriptive analysis was carried out using data from a manual record of students (n= 54) and teachers (n= 6) regarding six first level subjects of the Dentistry course of the Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Temuco campus.

Results:

The analysis revealed an incoherence between the hours of autonomous work used by the students with respect to what is established in the study plan and the hours of extra-classroom work estimated by the professors.

Conclusion:

It is concluded that the implementation of the Transferable Credit System alone does not ensure an improvement in student performance, requiring a review of the institutional procedure to define them; on the part of teachers a greater appropriation of the learning outcomes and the didactics necessary to guide students to obtain a higher yield of autonomous work, on the other hand, students must be responsible for the conscious use of these hours.

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