Hello,

I`d love to know what are the criteria that should exist in a PhD to be granted a "pass with distinction". Maybe those who have had it, or those who know about can help.

Thanks a lot.

That classification doesn't exist in the UK, at least not in the majority of awarding universities. The closest would be to 'pass with no corrections'.

A 'pass with distinction' or just 'distinction' is much more common in master's degrees.

Thank you for your answer. What would be the criteria in this case then?

To achieve a 'pass with no corrections' is quite self-explanatory. You need to be able to defend your thesis well and be confident about the justifications for every decision you've made. Your write-up needs to have no grammatical/spelling/logic errors. After this, you should have no corrections to do and can finalise your thesis. Depending on your field, passing with no corrections may be very common or extremely rare (and obviously depends on how hard-working you've been regarding your thesis).
However, your 'classification' (i.e. whether you had corrections, resubmitted etc.) does not appear on your certificate as PhDs are ungraded, so you wouldn't put this on your CV.

Almost everyone will have at least a handful of minor changes.
I must admit that I would have found it very suspicious if my external hadn't found a single error in my entire 279 page thesis. I would suspect they hadn't read it properly and that would have been a crap way to end the PhD.

No one really cares what at kind of pass you get for a PhD. It's about getting the PhD. (:

This is the best answer to this question.