We have applied the Glauber and Metropolis prescriptions to investigate the stationary states of the Ising model in one and two dimensions. We have employed the formalism of the master equation to follow the evolution of the system towards the stationary states. Although the Glauber and Metropolis transition rates lead the system to the same equilibrium states for the Ising model in the Monte Carlo simulations, we show that they can predict different results if we disregard the correlations between spins. The critical temperature of the one-dimensional Ising model cannot even be found by using the Metropolis algorithm and the mean field approximation. However, taking into account only correlations between nearest neighbor spins, the resulting stationary states become identical for both Glauber and Metropolis transition rates.