While a significant proportion of Australian medical schools as of the early 1990s have shifted from undergraduate to graduate entry programs (that is, enrolling students who have already completed a bachelor's degree in another field of study), medical schools continued to nevertheless award the MBBS as its standard medical degree regardless if it was an undergraduate or graduate entry program. Some medical schools have moved to awarding MD (or a combination of a BSc and MD) instead of the MBBS to its medical graduates. However, given that the MBBS is categorised in the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) as a Level 7 Bachelor's level degree it had the benefit of not mandating its students to partake in a research project, whilst the MD is categorised a Level 9 Master's level degree it does require its students to formally produce a research project as part of their studies; that said, students in the MBBS program commonly did nevertheless still pursue research on an extra-curricular basis.