Definitions

Before one can understand the requirements for academic degrees, one first must understand some terms about academic credit for a class:

semester

A semester is an academic term with a duration of 15 weeks. Typically in the USA, a university has two semesters per year: one begins in August and the other begins in January. (There is a third semester during the summer, but most students have jobs during the summer, instead of attending classes then.)

The state and federal governments in the USA spend billions of dollars every year to support universities in the USA. Surprisingly, there are no government standards for the quality of education at universities in the USA. Instead, minimum standards for education in universities are set by private, nonprofit corporations, called accrediting organizations.

My impression is that accreditation in the USA is mostly a bureaucracy, full of buzzwords about quality and integrity of degrees.