Undergraduate education
In Nigeria, undergraduate degrees (excluding Medicine, Medical Laboratory Science, Nursing, Engineering, Law and Architecture) are four-year-based courses.
Brazil follows the major traits of the continental European system; free public schools are available from kindergarten up to postgraduation, both as a right established in Article 6, caput of the Brazilian Constitution and as a duty of the State in Article 208, Items I, IV and V, of the Brazilian Constitution.
Admission to university is obtained by means of a competitive entrance exam known as Vestibular (a concept somewhat similar to the Baccalauréat in France).
A later system introduced in 2009, adopted by most federal universities, uses the high school national examination (ENEM) result as part or a replacement of the Vestibular grade.
Neither field specifies or prefers any undergraduate major,[citation needed] though medical schools require a set of courses that must be taken before enrollment.
Community colleges award associate degrees of different types, some intended to prepare students to transfer to four-year institutions (e.g.
Students sit for the Certificate of Education examinations at around sixteen years of age, and the Advanced-level, or A-level examinations at around eighteen, then follow by three years of undergraduate education, except for a few specific fields, such as medicine, nursing and law.
Students may be able to receive general education in their first years in universities, more akin to the North American system.
Alternatives are undergraduate certificates or diplomas, with some equivalent to associate degree in educational level.
India's higher education system is the third largest in the world, next to the United States and China.
Accreditation for higher learning is overseen by 15 autonomous institutions established by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
In India, the graduation system is classified into two parts: Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG).
Indian higher education system has expanded at a fast pace by adding nearly 20,000 colleges and more than 8 million students in a decade from 2000–01 to 2010–11.
In Pakistan, it generally requires four years to complete a Bachelor's degree in Arts, Sciences, Dentistry, Engineering or Business Administration such as BA, BS, BDS, BE/BS/BSc Engineering or BBA and five years for bachelor's degrees in medicine (MBBS), Physiotherapy (DPT), Pharmacy (Pharm.D) and Architecture (B.Arch.)
in science; and a fifth stage covering college and university programs leading to baccalaureate, professional, master's and doctorate degrees.
The pre-primary or preparatory classes, called kachi (literally, unripe) or Nursery school, were formally integrated into the education system in 1988.
Students in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland may usually enter university from the age of eighteen, often having studied A-levels and thus having had thirteen to fifteen years of schooling.
Occasionally students who finish A Level or equivalent qualifications early (after skipping a year in school on the grounds of academic giftedness) may enter below this age but large universities are now setting minimum age limits of 16 or 17 after a number of well publicised "child prodigies" were found to be emotionally and mentally unprepared for university life.
[citation needed] Applications for undergraduate courses in UK higher education are made through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS).
Under the new Bologna reform, universities in Europe are introducing the Bachelor level (BA or BS) degree, often by dividing a five-year Master-level program into two parts (three-year Bachelor's + two-year Master's), where students are not obligated to continue with the second Master's-degree part.
However, as with the rest of the UK, integrated master's degrees are popular in science and engineering, although in Scotland they last for five years.
In most bachelor's studies, students are required to obtain their propaedeutic certificate within three semesters after starting the course.
A propaedeutic certificate also counts as a requirement for participating in a university level bachelor's study.
The propaedeutic exams have the purpose of assessing whether a student has the appropriate capacities in order to complete the course.
