Master of Engineering Degree in United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the Master Engineering (M.Eng) is an undergraduate award, available after pursuing a four or five year course of study. These are taught courses, with only a small research element in the third and/or final year, and are not available as postgraduate qualifications in most cases. Most British universities offer both the traditional three or four year courses in engineering, leading to a B.Sc. or B.Eng, and a M.Eng respectively.

Some universities, such as Brunel University, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, offer only the four year M.Eng, although even these make provision for leaving at the end of the third year. For those who leave after three years or fail the fourth year, a B.Sc is awarded. The Open University run the MEng study as a postgraduate degree requiring a BEng to be completed, at most, 2 years prior.

The Engineering Council Postgraduate Diploma is set at the final year of a British MEng. The MEng is now a mandatory requirement for application to become a Chartered Engineer.

n terms of course structure, M.Eng degrees usually follow the pattern familiar from bachelor’s degrees with lectures, laboratory work, coursework and exams each year. There is usually a substantial project to be completed in the fourth year which may have a research element to it, and a more teaching-based project to be completed in the third year. At the end of the third year, there is usually a threshold of academic performance in examinations to allow progression to the final year. At some universities, the structure of the final year is rather different from that of the first three, for example, at the University of York, the final year for the Computer Systems and Software programme consists entirely of project work and intensive advanced seminar courses rather than traditional lectures and problem classes. Final results are, in most cases, awarded on the standard British undergraduate degree classification scale, although some universities award something structurally similar to ‘Distinction’, ‘Merit’, ‘Pass’ or ‘Fail’ as this is often the way that taught postgraduate master’s degrees are classified.

At some universities in the U.K. in the early 1980s, the M.Eng was awarded as a taught postgraduate degree after 12 months of study. Its entry requirements would typically be like those for other taught postgraduate courses, including holding an undergraduate degree, and its format would be similar to the modern M.Eng although, as with many postgraduate master’s degrees, the project would extend over a longer period. M.Eng courses in their modern, undergraduate form were introduced in the mid-1980s in response to growing competition from technical-degree graduates from continental Europe, where degree courses are often longer than the usual three years in the U.K. There was a feeling among recent graduates, the engineering institutions, employers and universities, that the longer and more in-depth study offered on the continent needed to be made available to U.K. students as well. Since to obtain a taught master’s degree in the U.K. typically took an additional year beyond a bachelor’s degree, it was decided that this extra year would be integrated into the undergraduate program and, instead of pursuing both a bachelor’s and master’s degree, students would proceed directly to a master’s degree.

Since its introduction, the M.Eng has become the degree of choice for most undergraduate engineers, as was intended. The most common exception to this is international students who, because of the substantially higher fees they are charged, sometimes opt to take the tradition B.Eng/B.Sc. route where that is available. Most of the engineering institutions have now made an M.Eng the minimum academic standard necessary to become a Chartered Engineer. Graduates who graduated before the changes in the rules will still be allowed to use their bachelor’s degree for this purpose and those who have earned a bachelor’s degree since the changes can usually take some additional courses (known as ‘matching sections’) over time to reach an equivalent standard to the M.Eng.