Just a quick question. most degrees in the UK seem to have the standard length of three years with the option of a year for award of a masters of some kind.

ive always found it quite amusing when i hear people talking about their undergraduate masters because where i come from, the standard lengh of a degree is four years and there is such thing as an undergraduate masters.

In fact most european countries, five years is standard for a batchelors degree in my feild.

do these undergraduate masters hold any weight in britain? just interested to know

as far as I know a masters is a masters whether you do it as an undergrad or post grad. it's jsut called different things to distinguish how you did it

I've not actually heard of an undergraduate masters. Unless it refers to the MPharm degree; apparantely the final year of that (4-year) degree is considered a Masters-level year.

It's quite common in Engineering and Sciences and I'm under the impression it is a standard Masters - you just miss out the whole searching for a Masters step. In fact, there might even be some sort of internal reapplying step - I wouldn't assume you are guaranteed to get a Masters if you originally apply for a 3+1 course.

yes they're common in science and engingeering. You normally apply for the 4year masters, but in order to do it you must get a 2i or above after completing your BSc/BEng year

Although there are such things as undergraduate masters courses, they're not equivalent to a postgraduate masters. From what people in admissions have said to me, a postgraduate masters course is more impressive than an undergraduate course mainly because the manner in which people are taught is quite different. In my experience, the postgraduate masters I'm doing is far more 'grown up' than both my undergraduate degree and the final year of several of my friend's MSci courses. In my friend's undergraduate MSci year they were very much treated as one of the crowd and their projects were pretty much a waste of time whereas in the projects we are working on in my MSc, we're working in the same research groups and alongside PhD students.

I know a few people who have done both an undergraduate masters course and are either on or have finished a postgraduate masters course. They all agree that their postgraduate courses were miles better. In the defense of undergraduate masters courses, however, they do get the same funding as undergraduate degrees and a lot more students tend to be on them. Firstly, a lot of them aren't interested in postgraduate work and so treat the masters year as an undergraduate year and secondly there are a lot more students on the courses meaning the lecturers and supervisors can't give as much attention to each student.

I think they they give a taster into research, which is handy for a science student to decide if they want to do a PhD (seeing as for most science PhDs you don't need a masters).