I'm Sarah, I'm at a London uni (but live in Oxf. with my husband), I'm an archaeologist and just finishing my second Masters before embarking on a PhD.......

And so we come back to the fact Amis is an author teaching creative writing.

Tho' if a hollywood-style studio was teaching film production then surely you wouldn't complain?

OK OK.. I'm being stupid.

Some Institutions will give your coursework/ exams in grades or marks irrespective of the final 'grade'. E.g. here at UCL you get a grade and mark associated with each course then Past/ Distinction (we don't have Merits).

And only if you're an anthropologists...

Most of us haven't any real idea of the direction our research will go in, it's heavily paper driven and so forth. You just need to propose a framework. Consider ethnographers having to put forward proposals before they've gone to the field!

And mine; it doesn't make them impossible tho'!

You've given no info whatsoever here....
Country of origin....
Subject.....

But then you have the people with marks into the high seventies, even eighties..... maybe even the big 90.
Which begins to sound very different to a sixty five.

If you're not intending to go into academia LSE might be the best option. However you also need to bear in mind (at least for home students) their ridiculously high fees!
x

I received an 'informal' offer as it's my home dept, after around six weeks, the letter didn't come for another three or four though.
If you do need to know urgently I suggest you tell them tho. It won't necessarily make any difference -- I had an offer of a partial scholarship from LSE but wanted to go to Oxf; had to give my response on the scholarship rapidly, but Oxf didn't oblige in telling me whether I had an offer for another three months. Very stressful times!

Wait?!
My PhD app was in my Dept and I was assured I was pretty much guaranteed an offer. It still took longer than three weeks.

I wonder if you realise I wasn't the original poster?

As far as i'm concerned email is the worst of both worlds. It's sufficiently informal for people to think they can get away with what you might say in person. But it appears like a letter does, tho' without the benefits of handwriting and phone calls, in which you can read intonation much better. The number of times I've tried to work out exactly what my sup intends by what he's written in an email!