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Single or Joint honours?

GCSE2016Troop

Is there a stigma that single/pure degree's better than joint degrees?

Also, are joint degrees harder than a single degrees as some say studying two means more work and your 3rd year is more difficult?

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Universities Forum Helper

No, one is not perceived to be better than the other, at least not outside of TSR, the majority of whom seem unaware of any of the actual details of how joint/single honours works.

You study the same number of credits on both single and joint honours and thus they are nominally the same amount of work. The work is in two (or occasionally more) different areas, which MAY impact your workload to an extent. This will usually only make a difference where the two subjects are very different (e.g. history and chemistry, or similar odd splits, which tend to be quite unusual to find).

The only circumstance a joint honours MAY be slightly more "work" (at least in the sense of contact hours) is in certain combinations of science subjects at certain universities where you may end up with more lab time than you would on a single honours. Additionally it may FEEL like more work as often "study/professional skills" type modules are the first to be left out to fit in the other subject modules, so you might not find there are as many "doss" modules that you're taking. Additionally double/triple language subjects would likely have more contact hours to facilitate the learning of the languages.

How much "work" they are is really a function of how much effort you put into the different aspects of the course. While there may be more contact hours on some courses this doesn't mean they're necessarily easier or harder than others. Maths course tend to be fairly middle of the road in terms of contact hours, but the weekly problem sets are extremely time consuming. Conversely language degrees as noted have quite high contact hours due to the needs of learning the language, but for a talented linguist the actual work involved to achieve this and outside of contact hours is likely to be lower than you may expect.

Regarding third year, it realistically won't make a difference. You normally only write one dissertation, either in one of the two subjects or jointly between them, and outside of that the courses taken again are balanced by credit loads and fixed at a certain amount per year.