Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course that generally lasts three years in the UK (except Scotland, where four is customary) or four years in North America.
In some countries the degree is awarded either as a pass degree or as an honours degree which requires a high academic standard and, in some cases, an extra year of study.
There are two main types of bachelor's degree, the BA or AB (Bachelor of Arts) and the BSc (UK-usage) or BS (US-usage) (Bachelor of Science), awarded in subjects that fall into the general categories of arts and science respectively. There are no hard and fast rules about this; for example, the University of Cambridge has no BScs, making even a physics graduate a Bachelor of Arts.
In the UK, medical students are traditionally awarded a double bachelor's degree after five years of study: MB BS or MB BCh. These are the bachelor of medicine and the bachelor of surgery degrees. Unlike other UK undergraduate degrees, these are not divided into honours classifications.
In the last hundred years, the range of bachelor's degrees has expanded beyond the traditional BA and BSc.
Some of these new degrees and their abbreviations include:
- BASc - Bachelor of Applied Science
- BBA - Bachelor of Business Administration
- BComm - Bachelor of Commerce
- BD - Bachelor of Divinity
- BEd - Bachelor of Education
- BEng - Bachelor of Engineering
- BMus - Bachelor of Music
- BSF - Bachelor of Science in Forestry
- LLB - Bachelor of Legal Letters - Law Degree
