I’ve been trying to find out what it all means, like there’s Bachelor’s degree, Doctorate, Bachelor of Design and Master of Education. But what do they mean? Is a bachelor’s degree the lowest degree you can get and master’s is the highest or do different courses have different names for their degrees?
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A bachelor’s is a basic, standard college degree. It means you know the core things in that field, enough to be considered a professional on it, though not an academic expert. Traditionally, a bachelor’s takes four years, usually ~2.5 of the field in question and ~1.5 of more general education.
Master’s or doctorate degrees are more advanced. They usually require you to do some research in that field and, especially for a doctorate, contribute to it.
Master’s degrees usually add 2 years on top of a bachelor’s, and end with a *thesis* – a thorough research paper in the student’s area of expertise that contributes some useful summary of existing knowledge, usually with some extra work to synthesize it on top of that.
A doctorate doesn’t have a specific timeframe, but is longer than a master’s, and it ends with a more difficult final project called a *dissertation*. Dissertations are expected to be original work in the student’s area of expertise. You’re supposed to research or develop something new, something others haven’t developed and that contributes something to your area of study. A mathematician might prove a new theorem, a biologist might conduct a new experiment, etc. Dissertations are presented by the student to a team of professors at the university (a “defense”), and that team decides whether the dissertation is accepted or not. It’s usually the last thing a student does before earning a doctorate, and “ABD” (“all but dissertation”) students are pretty common.
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