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Firstly, and undergrad degree in the UK is generally 3 years long, as they do not usually have the extensive required core that US unis have (they cover the core in secondary school, but they also attend secondary school longer). Many grads then take an extra year for a post-grad diploma if they are planning on going to grad school, but not all. It's certainly not required.
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<p>BA degrees normally take 3 years to complete in the UK. In engineering/CS and natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), it is now common though for students to enroll (BrEng enrol) in 4-year programs (BrEng programmes) that lead both to a BA (Honours) and a so-called "undergraduate master's degree", e.g. an MEng or MSci degree. </p>
<p>If a student graduates with a 4-year undergraduate degree, he/she may be allowed to go straigth into a PhD program without having to obtain a postgraduate master's first. Students in arts and humanities, who normally hold a 3-year BA only, are however usually expected to get a 1-year MPhil before being accepted as PhD students. For example, with only very few exceptions, the Faculty of History at Cambridge requires a postgraduate master's degree for all applicants wishing to read for a PhD. In any case, all accepted PhD students remain on probation during their first year in the program and are only confirmed as PhD candidates after a "research evaluation exercise" (similar to a US PhD Thesis Proposal) by the end of the third term. </p>
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Going from an MPhil to the PhD is not a big leap. Both are purely research degrees, so basically for the MPhil you take a couple years and produce a lengthy thesis, then for the PhD you expand on said thesis. Therefore, the vast majority of research is completed, the outline and thesis is finished and critiqued - at which point I would wonder if it took more than 3-4 years to finish the diss.
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<p>Terminology varies from university to university. In the "new" universities, taught master's degrees are referred to as an MSc (not to be confused with the * undergraduate* MSci) in science/engineering or an MA in the humanities area. An MPhil on the other hand is a research degree as you've described. In Oxford and Cambridge however, an MPhil is usually a one-year part-taught, part-research degree with assessment based on a combination of written exams and a dissertation. The research master's degree for example in History at Cambridge is referred to as an MLitt instead.</p>
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In the US, however, it is very different. We have not such thing as a pure research degree. If a person goes straight to the PhD from BA/BS, there are 2 yrs coursework, then comps, THEN research. The research portion of the program generally consists of an initial proposal defense, then the research/writing of the diss, then sometimes meetings or readings/comments by committee, then more revisions, then defense, after which sometimes there are more revisions. My understanding (and this could be incorrect) is that at least in the UK, comments/revisions/etc. take place mostly between primary advisor and student only until defense.
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<p>I'm not sure, but I think your understanding is incorrect. From what I know, if anything, the final oral exam (* Viva Voce *) is a much bigger deal in the UK than in the US. First of all, it is not a public exam and the candidate's supervisor cannot normally serve as an examiner (although he/she may be present as a matter of courtesy only). Furthermore, the examiners may not only fail the candidate (which is very rare though), but also, depending on the thesis, may recommend that the candidate be awarded a master's degree instead of a PhD (that is also rare, but it is known to happen to a handful of candidates every year). The most common outcome though is, like in the US, for the thesis to be accepted subject to extensive revisions as required by the examiners. It may take an additional term in residency at the university for the candidate to complete all necessary revisions before he/she can graduate.</p>
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The result is that UK scholars are, first and foremost, researchers, while the US system focuses on balancing the research and teaching training. Attending classes is seen as necessary, not only as a broader base of knowledge (especially since all PhD students, at least in the humanities, need to also have at least one totally distinct minor field, which isn't found frequently in Europe), but also as training for the way a class should be run and learning the skills of critique and debate.
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<p>I can't really comment on that, first of all because humanities is not my field and, second, because, having done my PhD in the US, I don't really have a good basis for comparison (other than what I heard from friends of mine who got their degrees in Europe). It is true though that, all together, a student in the UK may get a BA, a master's, and a PhD degree in seven or, more likely, seven and a half years. By comparison, it would normally take 8 years to do the same in France and at least 10 years (most likely more) in the US. As someone wrote in this forum before, I suspect the pressure for degrees to be completed in shorter times comes from the fact that UK universities are not as well funded as their US counterparts and institutions are heavily penalized (BrEng penalised) with government funding cuts if PhD students graduate in more than four years.</p>