Students are eligible for the IOPS Certificate when they meet the following criteria:

The curriculum part (updated 2025-2026) 

• Completion of the 2 EC mandatory course “What is psychometrics?”.
  Exemption for “What is psychometrics” is not possible.
• Completion of elective IOPS courses with a total of at least 8 EC.
  For the elective courses, it is allowed to follow relevant courses (e.g., about network modelling or programming) outside IOPS, with a maximum of 2 EC. Send your request for permission of the IOPS board to the secretary of IOPS: secretariaat@iops.nl. This request consists of a short description of the course contents, the provider of the course, and the number of course credits. It is mandatory to send the secretary a certificate of the course afterwards.
  SMiP courses can be counted towards 5 EC elective courses.
• Attendance of at least four IOPS conferences

See Courses for a schematic overview of all the courses.

When planning the courses over four years, it is advised to spread out the time as follows:
35% – 35% – 20% – 10%.

The research part

• The PhD project lasts about four years and results in a dissertation.
• IOPS PhD students present their work twice at an IOPS conference: one poster presentation at an early stage and one oral presentation at the end of their project. For more information have a look at these guidelines on the presentation.

The review part

• IOPS PhD students review 2 proposals of prospective IOPS PhD students
• IOPS PhD students fulfil the role of discussant for two talks of an IOPS conference