Professional degree

A professional degree, sometimes known as a first professional degree, is a degree that prepares someone to work in a particular profession, often meeting the academic requirements for licensure or accreditation. Professional degrees may be either graduate or undergraduate entry, depending on the profession concerned and the country, and may be classified as bachelor's, master's or doctoral degrees. For a variety of reasons, professional degrees may bear the name of a different level of qualification from their classification on qualifications frameworks, e.g. some UK professional degrees are named bachelor's but are at master's level, while some Australian and Canadian professional degrees have the name "doctor" but are classified as master's or bachelor's degrees.

In Europe, the first academic degrees were doctorates in law given to recognise teachers (doctors) of civil law at the University of Bologna (see Juris Doctor).

The first university medical school to be established in the United Kingdom was at the University of Edinburgh in 1726, followed in 1744 by the University of Glasgow. In 1817 Glasgow became the first British university to offer a separate degree in surgery, the Master of Surgery. However, other Scottish universities – St Andrews and the two universities in Aberdeen – also offered medical degrees, often in absentia and without examination, despite not having medical schools. In England, the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were only sporadically interested in medical teaching, which was mainly carried out in the London hospitals. It was not until the establishment of the University of London in 1836, however, that students at the hospital medical schools could earn degrees. Following the passing of the Medical Act 1858 and the establishment of the General Medical Council, Scottish graduates gained the right to practice in England and degrees in both medicine and surgery became the norm, standardising eventually on the double Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree.

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