Preliminary MA results

I got my preliminary results (though still no feedback for one of my essays! grr) today for the three MA units plus my Latin exam. For the core unit I got 61%, although I knew this already, and for both of the 6,000 word essays I got 66%—which is pretty good seeing as that’s a good merit and it’s the first time I’ve written an ancient history essay. The feedback for my Demes and Democracy essay was generally positive, apparently I made an interesting original linguistic point and put forward some shrewd arguments, which is high praise considering the comments were coming from very respected academics in the field. I also got a comment saying that my rebuttal of an eminent scholar’s argument was convincing, which I thought was rather amusing given that the scholar in question is a prominent academic with lots of published material and I’m just an MA student who yet to obtain any qualification in this area. 🙂

Unfortunately the Latin utterly took me to pieces though—I got 40%, which wouldn’t even be a pass at MA level had I not done so well in the essays to compensate. Not only is it a pretty rubbish mark, but it pulls down my average so I will probably get a pass overall instead of the merit I was aiming for. I suspect it also sinks any chance of getting the DPhil, I think when they see a breakdown of my results they won’t even bother to invite me for an interview. 🙁 I would rant about being in four different classes for Latin this year, but it would probably just make me sound bitter (which I am to an extent).

So, everything now hangs on my dissertation, which is coming along slowly. My tutor didn’t turn up for our meeting today, but hopefully I will see him before the end of the week because I need him to act as a referee for my application, as well as to run a few things by him before he goes away on holiday. I think if I do a really good job on this I might just scrape a merit, but I’m not sure.

Ah well, in good news I had my professional membership of the British Computer Society confirmed, which might be a useful thing to have if I go for jobs. It also grants me the right to use the postnominals MBCS, although I doubt I will ever use them (I don’t bother using my MIET postnominals either).