Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery - Classification

Classification

Medical degrees differ from other undergraduate degrees in that they are professional qualifications which lead holders to enter a particular career upon receipt. This is not the case with most other undergraduate degrees, so whilst the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery are undergraduate or graduate degrees (depending on the institution), they are perhaps more accurately conceptualised as a so-called first professional degree. Other professions whose qualifications follow a similar pattern include:

• Dentistry
• Education
• Engineering
• Optometry
• Pharmacy
• Physical Therapy
• Law
• Veterinary Medicine
• Osteopathy
• Physician Assistant

Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery are usually awarded as general/ordinary degrees, not as honours degrees, and as such the graduate is not classified as for honours degrees in other subjects. However, at many institutions (for example the University of Sheffield, University of Liverpool, University of Leicester and University of Manchester in England and the University of Dundee in Scotland) it is possible for the degrees to be awarded with Honours (i.e. MB ChB (Hons.)) or with Commendation, if the board of examiners recognises exceptional performance throughout the degree course. Very few of these are awarded.

More often, it is possible to study one subject for an extra year for an intercalated honours degree. This is usually a Bachelor of Science (BSc), Bachelor of Medical Science (BMedSci), Bachelor of Medical Biology (BMedBiol) or similar: at Oxford and Cambridge in England and Dublin in Ireland Bachelor of Arts degrees are awarded. At a few universities most medical students obtain an ordinary degree in science as well: when the University of Edinburgh had a six year course, the third year was followed by award of an ordinary BSc(MedSci). In Australia, The University of Melbourne in Australia offers an Arts Degree (BA) to a medical student on the completion of two extra years of undergraduate study, and Monash University offers a Law degree (LLB); if the optional Law degree is undertaken, on completion of their degree the student may choose to do a one-year internship at a hospital and become a doctor, or spend one year doing articles to practise thereafter as a lawyer. At the University of Nottingham and the University of Southampton, both in England, all medical students on the five year course obtain a Bachelor of Medical Sciences (BMedSci) degree without an extra intercalated year. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland along with certain National University of Ireland medical schools offers a BMedSci qualification on completion of a thesis based on 2–3 months of summer research; only students achieving honours in their preclinical courses are eligible to receive the degree. At Imperial College London and University College London, certain medical students are able to extend their intercalated year to an extra three years, thus temporarily exiting the MBBS course to complete a PhD. Upon completion of the PhD, the student is required to sit the remaining 2 years of the medicine course in order to receive his/her MBBS degeee. The University of the West Indies, Mona in Kingston, Jamaica automatically awards a Bachelor of Medical Sciences (BMedSci) degree to all students who have successfully completed three years of their MBBS programme.