Note 174 — Chapter XIX

The origin of the bachelor's degree, which comes at the end of our college course nowadays, may be explained as follows: The bachelor in the thirteenth century was a student who had passed part of his examinations in the course in "arts," as the college course was then called, and was permitted to teach certain elementary subjects before he became a full-fledged master. So the A.B. was inferior to the A.M. then as now. After finishing his college course and obtaining his A.M., the young teacher often became a student in one of the professional schools of law, theology, or medicine, and in time became a master in one of these sciences. The words master, doctor, and professor meant pretty much the same thing in the thirteenth century.