Higher Education Systems - UK
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland Bachelor’s degrees are usually three-year programs, with students’ studies focused almost exclusively on the degree discipline. In Scotland the Bachelor’s degree is usually a four-year degree, and during the first two years the students spend one third of their time on Informatics, one third on Mathematics and one third on any other subjects of their choice. There are some exceptions to these general patterns; for example, some degrees include a year of industrial placement. Most degrees are termed Honours degrees and the degree is awarded with a class (First - A average, Upper Second - B average, Lower Second - C average, and Third - D average). At most universities, students who fail to make the third class cutoff do not earn an Honours degree, rather they may be awarded an Ordinary (pass) degree. Universities that do not award pass degrees fail students who do not have a D average. The usual reason for obtaining a pass degree is not passing a final year individual project (or dissertation).
Entry to University is centrally organized by UCAS (Universities and College Admissions Service). In the autumn of the final year of secondary school students apply to up to five programs through UCAS. They may receive offers based on their actual or predicted grades in national exams (A-levels in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Highers and Advanced Highers in Scotland). Many courses have standard offers in terms of the grades that they expect students to have achieved before entering the program, but they may relax these for individual students that they particularly want. In the spring students must select a preferred offer, and a secondary offer (usually with lower grades). The national exams are taken in May and results are published in August. Students who match their preferred offer grades take up the places offered. Other students enter a process known as Clearing, in which UCAS tries to match them with programs in the same discipline that still have places and are willing to accept the lower grades.
Most MSc courses in the UK are one-year programs, taking a full 12 months (in contrast to undergraduate programs which usually only operate over 9 months of the year). Entry into the program is made on the basis of the applicant’s undergraduate degree. For UK students at least an upper second class degree is expected. Entrance is handled by each program within each University in a distributed manner: there is no equivalent to UCAS.
Within the UK there is a standard of transferrable credits system. It is called CATS (Creadit Accumulation and Transfer Scheme) and can be comparable with ECTS: 2 CATS points = 1 ECTS point. 10 CATS points correspond to a module entailing approximately 100 hours of work, and would be typically be one course over one semester. The standard load for undergraduates is 120 CATS points per year; for MSc students, 180 CATS points.
In the undergraduate programs, progression is judged from year to year and generally requires that the requisite number of credits at the appropriate level have been achieved in the previous year. In Bachelor’s degrees the major component of assessment will be written exams, either taken at the end of the course or at the end of the year. For computer science there will also typically be some practical component. For Pre-Honours years, students who fail a course may resit the exam, up to three times. Exams are usually offered twice per year: in the main diet and in the resit diet. "Resit" and "diet" are commonly used academic terms in the UK. A resit is a repeat exam in the sense that the student is examined on the material as previously presented although the examination paper is new — no further teaching is involved before the examination. Thus, a student who fails an exam twice will be required to repeat the year. The term "resit" is widely used but it is not universal (for example, at the University of Southampton these are called "referred exams"). Exams are only offered at certain times of the year and each of these times is known as "diet". For example in Edinburgh there is the December diet, the April diet and the August diet (which is the resit diet). Once students have entered the Honours years they usually need to pass the exams at the first sitting to achieve Honours.
MSc students are assessed in a similar way, with exams at the end of the course or the end of the year, although it is a little more likely here to have some courses that are assessed on the basis of coursework only, without a written exam. Students must successfully pass all courses before they are allowed to progress to the project. Some universities permit resits for MSc exams, but many do not. Successful completion of the MSc degree requires both the taught element and the project to be passed. Students who successfully complete some courses but not sufficient to gain admittance to the project stage of the MSc are awarded a Post-graduate Certificate or Post-graduate Diploma depending on the number of credits achieved.
A dissertation project is an integral part of an Honours degree and is typically performed over six months in parallel with courses in the final year. Failure of the project will generally mean that the student cannot be awarded an Honours degree and will be awarded a Pass degree instead. Students who do not manage to pass the requisite number of courses for an Ordinary degree may be awarded a Certificate of Higher Education.
For an MSc program, the dissertation project typically takes place after courses have been completed (and successfully passed), and lasts for about 3 months at the end of the program.
With a few exceptions, industrial placements or internships are not required for most undergraduate or MSc degrees in the UK. However, many undergraduates undertake internships during the summer vacation before their final year. This is encouraged by the Universities but does not accrue any credit for the student’s program. Since the MSc program is typically a full 12 months there is no opportunity for industrial placements or internships during the program.
Like admission to MSc programs, admission to PhD programs is handled in a distributed manner for each department, or even subgroups within departments. Each applicant is judged on a case-by-case basis so it is difficult to give any general rules. However, if the applicant is from the UK a Bachelor’s degree of at least upper second class will be required. Most PhD programs do not require an MSc, but some programs funded by the UK government through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as Centres of Doctoral Training, are four-year programs and most incorporate a Master’s degree within the first year. However, this is often a MRes (MSc by research) rather than a taught MSc, and has a much higher proportion of dissertation work and only a few taught courses.
Students are often admitted to PhD programs on one-year probation, and only gain full admission to the program at the end of the first year after some progression hurdle. This typically involves writing a thesis proposal document and defending it to a small committee of academics. The final examination of a PhD is through the written dissertation and a closed oral examination, termed a viva. Each student has two examiners: one from another University, one from the same department who has not been formally involved in the supervision of the student. The student submits a version of the dissertation to be assessed by the examiners before the viva, and then has an opportunity to discuss the work in the viva. After the viva the examiners make recommendations about the award of the degree and any corrections that they require to the dissertation.
Practice varies between universities, but vivas are generally closed with only the examiners, student and possibly the supervisor present. There is no formal requirement for publications from the dissertation to have appeared before the viva, although in practice most students will have at least two or three publications at this stage. Most universities have a minimum period of study of three years for a PhD and a maximum of four years.