Master's degrees

A master's degree (from Latin magister) is a second-cycle academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice. A master's degree normally requires previous study at the bachelor's level, either as a separate degree or as part of an integrated course. Within the area studied, master's graduates are expected to possess advanced knowledge of a specialized body of theoretical and applied topics; high order skills in analysis, critical evaluation, or professional application; and the ability to solve complex problems and think rigorously and independently.

The master's degree dates back to the origin of European universities, with a Papal bull of 1233 decreeing that anyone admitted to the mastership in the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. The original meaning of the master's degree was thus that someone who had been admitted to the rank (degree) of master (i.e. teacher) in one university should be admitted to the same rank in other universities. This gradually became formalised as the licentia docendi (licence to teach). Originally, masters and doctors were not distinguished, but by the 15th century it had become customary in the English universities to refer to the teachers in the lower faculties (arts and grammar) as masters and those in the higher faculties as doctors. Initially, the Bachelor of Arts (BA) was awarded for the study of the trivium and the Master of Arts (MA) for the study of the quadrivium.

The nineteenth century saw a great expansion in the variety of master's degrees offered. At the start of the century, the only master's degree was the MA, and this was normally awarded without any further study or examination.The Master in Surgery degree was introduced by the University of Glasgow in 1815. By 1861 this had been adopted throughout Scotland as well as by Cambridge and Durham in England and the University of Dublin in Ireland. When the Philadelphia College of Surgeons was established in 1870, it too conferred the Master of Surgery, "the same as that in Europe".

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