Which Qualification to Assess When You Have Several
You’re at the kitchen table with three certificates in front of you — a diploma, a degree, and a postgraduate certificate on top of that — trying to work out which one you actually pay to have assessed. The question of which qualification to assess when you have several doesn’t need to be agonising. In most cases, it’s already been made for you.
Start with the highest one
The standard approach is assessing your highest credential first, and for good reason: in most cases, a Canadian assessor only needs your highest completed credential to produce an ECA report. If the postgraduate certificate is your most advanced qualification, that’s usually the one that goes in — not the degree underneath it, and not the diploma underneath that. Confirm this with your specific assessor before paying for anything, since the exact rule can vary slightly by body, but it’s the reasonable default to start from.
Why paying for extra assessments isn’t automatically worth it
The practical version of the same point is knowing when a second assessment adds no points. If your assessor only uses the highest credential for the ECA report itself, assessing the lower ones on top rarely changes anything by itself. I don’t have a confirmed CRS point value to hand you for exactly how education level or multiple credentials factor into your score — that table isn’t something the research behind this post pins down with real numbers, and I’m not going to invent one. Use IRCC’s own CRS criteria tool directly to see what your specific combination of credentials is actually worth before you decide a second assessment is worth paying for.
The cost side has genuinely gotten better
The cost per additional credential assessment used to mean paying the full fee twice if you wanted two credentials assessed. That’s changed with at least one provider: CES, the University of Toronto’s Comparative Education Service, now assesses up to two credentials under a single fee, a change that took effect in September 2025. If you’re weighing whether a second credential is worth assessing at all, checking whether your chosen assessor offers something similar is worth five minutes before you assume it’ll cost double.
Deciding whether to assess a spouse’s qualification
Deciding whether to assess a spouse’s qualification is a genuinely separate calculation, and one that’s easy to overlook. Education completed outside Canada earns CRS points not just for the principal applicant but for a spouse or common-law partner too — so a spouse’s degree sitting unassessed on a shelf is simply unclaimed points. If your spouse holds a qualification and hasn’t had it assessed, that’s worth pricing into the decision alongside your own credentials, not treated as optional because they’re not the principal applicant.
What actually settles it
Start with your own highest credential, check the CRS tool for what your actual combination is worth before assuming a second assessment pays for itself, and don’t forget your spouse’s education sits in the same scoring system as yours. The paperwork gets simpler once you know which of those three questions you’re actually answering.
Cape2Canada’s Express Entry Explained guide covers how credential assessment fits into the points system as a whole.