  We study the analytically solvable Ising model of a single qubit system
coupled to a spin bath. The purpose of this study is to analyze and elucidate
the performance of Markovian and non-Markovian master equations describing the
dynamics of the system qubit, in comparison to the exact solution. We find that
the time-convolutionless master equation performs particularly well up to
fourth order in the system-bath coupling constant, in comparison to the
Nakajima-Zwanzig master equation. Markovian approaches fare poorly due to the
infinite bath correlation time in this model. A recently proposed
post-Markovian master equation performs comparably to the time-convolutionless
master equation for a properly chosen memory kernel, and outperforms all the
approximation methods considered here at long times. Our findings shed light on
the applicability of master equations to the description of reduced system
dynamics in the presence of spin-baths.
