Courses for courses?

Can a master’s degree course be taught using the same course as a bachelor’s degree course? With just different outcomes and assessments?

This practice seems to be a common occurrence across many higher education institutions, but it has a host of curriculum design issues, and possibly some ethical ones too.  

The AQF and standards

The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) is explicit in its agenda: ‘The key reasons why we have AQF qualifications are to ensure national recognition and consistency as well as common understanding across Australia of what defines each qualification.’ Let’s compare the two descriptors for both the bachelor’s and the master’s levels.

The AQF 7 Bachelor: The purpose of the bachelor’s degree qualification type is to qualify individuals who apply a broad and coherent body of knowledge in a range of contexts to undertake professional work and as a pathway for further learning.

The AQF 9 Masters: The purpose of the master’s degree (Coursework) is to qualify individuals who apply an advanced body of knowledge in a range of contexts for professional practice or scholarship and as a pathway for further learning.

Applying broad and coherent knowledge is a world apart from applying an advanced body of knowledge. This is different from what we might typically understand as a differentiated classroom, where students may be offered opportunities to engage in extended thinking that qualifies them to move beyond the pass level related to specific criteria of the course outcomes. This is because the content needed to facilitate students applying an advanced body of knowledge is vastly different from the level that the bachelor is pitched at. What this means is that even if we make the assessments more difficult for the master’s degree students to capture their advanced application, the curriculum itself is not providing the opportunity for them to learn and practise the advanced application, which means they can never be adequately prepared for the assessments.

Some might say that it is possible to create enough differentiation for the advanced students within the course, but then that content would be accessible to the bachelor students also and If they adequately understood the content, then technically they are learning at the advanced level. It would seem absurd to deny them access to the advanced assessments simply because they are not paying for that particular degree.

The obvious answer is to create enough advanced content that only the master’s degree students would engage with, but then this is essentially just creating a unique master’s degree course – which defeats the purpose of combining them in the first place.

What is a master’s course?

The most common counter to the argument outlined above is that typically a learner undertaking a master’s degree may enrol in subjects that are not related to their bachelor’s degree, which may have been completed many years ago, and so need to brush up or get up to speed in the new discipline area. These are typically foundational courses aimed at the AQF 7 level, but potentially even lower at AQF 6 or even 5. But the issue remains, could it be said that the learner qualifies as a ‘master’ if they haven’t learnt at AQF 9 level for the entirety of the time?

Ostensibly, it appears impossible to offer the same course content to two vastly different contexts. There is insufficient validity curriculum-wise, and students in both contexts would be rightly indignant at the obvious conflation. But, I may be wrong.

References

Clarke, M. (2021). AQF qualifications | AQF. [online] AQF. Available at: https://www.aqf.edu.au/framework/aqf-qualifications#toc-level-6-advanced-diploma-associate-degree-3 [Accessed 22 Oct. 2024].

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