A master's degree in the United Kingdom (from Latin magister) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges in most cases 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.
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.
However, some universities - particularly those in Scotland - award the Master of Letters (MLitt) to students in the Arts, Humanities, Divinity and Social Sciences, often with the suffix (T) to indicate it is a taught degree, to avoid confusion with the MLitt offered as a research degree.
For example, Salford Business School in Greater Manchester offers a degree which is only available to those who can show professional experience.
Advanced candidates for a taught postgraduate master's sometimes undertake the MPhil as it is considered a more prestigious degree, but it may also mean that the student could not afford or could not complete the full PhD.
The Master of Letters (MLitt) degree is a two-year research degree at many universities, including Cambridge and the ancient Scottish universities, and is generally awarded when a student cannot or will not complete the final year(s) of their PhD and so writes their research up for the MLitt.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge (along with the Trinity College Dublin in Ireland) award master's degrees to BAs without further examination, where seven years after matriculation have passed, and (in some but not all cases) upon payment of a nominal fee.
It is commonplace for recipients of the degree to have graduated several years previously and to have had little official contact with the university or academic life since then.
The only real significance of these degrees is that they historically conferred voting rights in university elections, it was seen as the point at which one became eligible to teach at the university and certain other privileges e.g. the right to dine at the holder's college's high table.
Scottish undergraduate honours courses (including the MA as well as the BA, BSc and LLB) are four years in length rather than the three years that is usual in the rest of the UK; three-year undergraduate degrees are available in Scotland but lead to non-honours degrees.