One common piece of advice for weak students who want to go into academia is that they do a terminal master's degree first before applying to PhD programmes. This, however, bothers me for two reasons:
If I'm not mistaken, master's degrees are, in some places, often seen as the first of a two-part process to getting advanced degrees, where the PhD is the second part. (This is the sense I get of many non-American systems.) So finding a terminal master's programme doesn't sound that simple to me, although this may depend on the field.
I would imagine that there's still a need for decent grades / recommendations / etc. to get into a master's programme in the first place. Something like GRE scores can be readily fixed via preparation, but a lack of appropriate coursework (due to concentration mismatch) or poor grades cannot be, and this might also mean very weak recommendations. In some fields where doing research assistant jobs after graduation are common, this might be still resolvable, but it does not appear to be so in something like math or the humanities.
If so, how viable it is actually to get into a terminal master's programme in order to boost future applications to PhD programmes?
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