Contacting Potential PhD Supervisor: Including grades I am starting to contact potential supervisors to do a PhD and I am wondering whether (and how) I should include my grades while contacting them. I am in the UK so there is no GPA standard (there is a GPA but it differs substantially between universities and can be very confusing). So far I have thought of including one of the following:


"Expecting a first class honours degree"
"... with an average of A"
"in the top 5% of my class"


The first two are probably more common but they only place me in the top 20%, I am in the top 5% however, but I feel a bit pretentious to say the third - or is it okay to do so? Is there a more suitable way of including this information?

I am including all my advanced (3rd and 4th year) courses in my CV (and not sending transcripts etc as I feel it would be spamming their inboxes to send loads of documents upon first contact) is that also okay?

By the way, the potential supervisors I am contacting are all over the world and therefore would be impossible to arrange meetings, otherwise I would have done so instead of relying on emails, but in this case, emails are the essential way of communicating with them which is why I am sort of being an overly perfectionist. 

Thanks very much,

(An active A.SE member that chose to write this one anonymously.)
I'm a little confused -- you're contacting faculty when you have not yet applied to or been accepted into the program?  What is your purpose in contacting them?  In my experience, at the very beginning stage before you apply, you might contact a faculty member to talk about their interests and what you'd like to work on, to see if you'd be a good fit, what the research possibilities might be, and so on.  Including all your background information at this point would be inappropriate, in my opinion.