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In some countries like Australia, Singapore etc, A candidate may be enrolled into Masters leading to PhD program on condition that he/she will pass the candidature test after the 1st year and are subsequently given PhD in the final/fourth year (subject to successful completion), which results in no M.Sc. degree in between.

Is there any discrepancy towards these PhD holder in academic or professional life?

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No. Once you have a PhD, nobody cares about your previous degrees, or if you even graduated from high school.

(I know at least one tenured professor who did not graduate from high school.)

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    I have a pedantic disagreement with this: the statement is true only under the assumption that all your degrees are in the same field. If you get a PhD after an MD, or if you get a PhD in sociology after a Masters in physics, the previous degrees might still matter. Your previous degrees in the same (or close related) field(s) don't matter. Aug 10, 2012 at 5:24
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    This brings to mind two very interesting cases: The famous mathematician Barry Mazur has no undergraduate degree. (He never completed MIT's ROTC requirements.) The famous philosopher Saul Kripke has no PhD!
    – Jeff
    Aug 10, 2012 at 15:08
  • My great-great-grand-advisor did not have a PhD. Or a middle name (just an initial).
    – JeffE
    Aug 10, 2012 at 15:27
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    Jack Edmonds, the father of Polyhedral Combinatorics (a major area of combinatorial optimization), never got a PhD. But that didn't stop him from becoming a math professor at Waterloo, which has one of the best departments in the world.
    – Dan C
    Aug 11, 2012 at 6:33
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This answers the title question.

It is not a bad idea to take a break between a BSc and a PhD, just to see what else is out there in the world. Maybe do a bit of travel or work for six months or year. The disadvantage thus of doing a PhD right after a BSc is that you spend too much time in school, getting deeper and deeper into one topic, without taking an opportunity to broaden your perspective.

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To amplify JeffE's answer, there are some instances where it will be inconvenient, in the sense that you will have to explain your situation.

Personally, I hold no master's degree. When I started my present job in Germany, this was looked upon as very unusual, and I had to explain that I attended a degree-granting university that did not require a master's for admission to PhD candidacy. (In Europe, the norm is that you essentially have to have a master's before beginning your PhD candidacy.)

Beyond that, however, there is generally no concerns beyond things that can be relatively easily explained. (The only thing I can think of is that if qualifications for a position are based on "years of experience," the truncated education may mean more post-educational work is required to satisfy the requirement.)

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Mainly, the answer is no, if you have a PhD no one will care whether you have a master's degree in the same area or not.

However, I disagree with JeffE that no one will ever care about your previous degrees. This statement is nearly true with regard to research, but I think it may be false for some other areas. For example, if you want to teach at a liberal arts school (undergraduate-only, focused more on breadth than many schools), then you'll have a better chance to land such a job if you got your bachelor's degree at a school like that. At times I find it helpful to mention that I got a master's degree in optimization and algorithms, rather than just saying that I have a master's in math. I think this can more readily convey the particular skill set I acquired. If the people evaluating you always did so rationally and with due diligence, yours master's degree (or lack thereof) probably wouldn't matter. However, humans are often lazy and/or emotional, so your mileage may vary.

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I don't have an MS, but I do have a BS and a PhD in the same field. I have had no professional problems as a result.

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