About my Degree

Cambridge degrees are weird in multiple ways. They don’t necessarily follow some conventions for how other degrees work, and I don’t want to appear to misrepresent my actual academic qualifications as a result of assumptions on behalf of the reader of my CV.

Therefore, I describe below what the conventions are which Cambridge degree holders are advised to follow.

What is your degree in? Link to heading

My BA degree indicates its “main field(s) of study for the qualification” as “Computer Science Tripos”. In the first year, I was required to split my time (25% Mathematics, 25% Physics, 50% Computer Science), but the convention is to refer to the entire degree by the Tripos subject. Therefore I refer to myself as having a degree in “Computer Science”.

Why isn’t it a BSc.? Link to heading

It just isn’t. Three-year degrees issued by Cambridge are BAs. It does not mean that an arts subject was studied.

What was your result? Link to heading

Cambridge, historically, did not generate a single result for the entire time studying a three-year course. For each year of my course, an entirely separate result was issued on my transcript. The convention has always been to only ever refer to your degree based on the result received in the third year modules. Students matriculating in 2020 and onwards now receive an overall degree classification but, for many courses (including Computer Science), that overall result is still entirely based on work completed in the final year of study.

Do you have a Master’s Degree? Link to heading

MAs are issued with no additional study as compared to a BA, a certain number of years after first joining the University. This is considered a non-academic degree¹, used solely to make them members of the university’s Senate if they did not proceed to study for a fourth year to get membership that way. This then confers additional benefits on them, such as being able to participate in the election of a new Chancellor.

“MA (Cantab.)” degrees are never issued with honours. A four-year (with honours) degree will always be of another type (e.g. MEng, MLit, MSci). However, it’s far too easy to read “MA” and believe that this means an academic degree, so I consider that the non-academic degree has no place in the ‘Education’ section of a CV.