A 1903 newspaper called Oxford and Cambridge master's degrees bogus academic frauds
At Oxford and Cambridge, a Master of Arts has long come without further study, awarded to bachelor's graduates after some years simply to make them full members of the university. In 1903 the London Daily News branded the practice one of the most stupendous frauds in academia. Defenders replied that the degree never claimed to reward learning.
The title descends from the Latin magister, teacher. A papal bull of 1233 ruled that anyone made a master at Toulouse could teach freely at any other university, so the rank travelled with its holder. Masters and doctors were originally the same thing; by the 15th century English universities used master for teachers of arts and grammar and doctor for the higher faculties. The first American masters were awarded at Harvard soon after its founding, and its rules of 1700 demanded a public exam, though by 1835 it too handed them out three years after the BA.
Scotland went its own way, making the MA the first degree at St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen. In 1832 Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that Scottish degree rules had become a dead letter, with masters created without residence or examination. England's newer universities pushed back: Durham reintroduced MA exams in 1837 and London followed in 1840, though Durham reverted to automatic awards for honours graduates in 1857.
New varieties multiplied in the 19th century. Glasgow created the Master in Surgery in 1815. In the US, the University of North Carolina revived an examined master's in 1856 and Michigan followed in 1859, having launched a Master of Science in 1858. Britain's first MSc came from Durham in 1878, while Oxford experimented with a Master of Natural Science in 1877 before quietly giving scientists BAs and MAs instead. Dartmouth's Master of Commercial Science, introduced in 1900 and first awarded in 1902, was the first business master's, an ancestor of today's MBA.
Later reforms tidied some of the tangle. In the 1960s Scotland's new universities, except Dundee, reverted to a BA first degree, and in 1982 Cambridge renamed its law bachelor's the LLM. Four-year integrated degrees like the MEng spread from the mid-1980s. The Dearing Report of 1997 counted five separate routes to a British master's, prompting a national qualifications framework.
Source: Master's degree
