Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA); 2x interviews
Interview 1: Questions on personal statement, One maths & One physics question; Interview 2: Questions on personal statement, One maths & One physics question
Went over personal statement; Practised answering questions about interests and physics and maths questions
Practised physics olympiad-style questions and past papers; Went through the specification for the paper
Making mistakes is okay!
Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.
Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.
Test taken:
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 5 minutes
Length of interviews: 30 minutes
Online interview: Yes
In my first interview I was asked questions about the content of half of my personal statement, it felt very much like a conversation rather than an interrogation which was a big relief! They then asked me one maths question and one physics question, both of which were well within what I'd learnt at school so I appreciated that. They were mostly interested in how I worked through it, so they didn't care that I made a factor of ten error when dividing!
In my second interview, I was asked about the second half of my personal statement, and about some real-world engineering problems - this was a topic I knew nothing about but my interviewer was more interested in how I thought about the problem than what I already knew. I then had another maths and physics question. I took a somewhat overly complicated approach to the physics problem, so my interviewer pointed me in the right direction. I think overall practising talking about my personal statement was the most useful thing I did - I had been told that they wouldn't ask much about my personal statement so I wasn't expecting it and it was good that I was prepared!
I practised in two different ways - practising answering questions about my interests and practising 'interview style' physics and maths questions.
For the first type, I asked family members to read my personal statement and come up with questions just to get me talking about it. Rereading my personal statement was also helpful!!
I used i-want-to-study-engineering.org for maths and physics practice and tried to get comfortable with explaining how I was working through a question as I did it.
I started by doing physics challenge/olympiad-style questions to practice my problem-solving skills before moving on to ENGAA papers. There aren't that many past papers available, and the format changed a few years ago so I tried to save them for the weeks leading up to the exam, except for one that I did at the end of August to gauge where I was. As silly as it may sound, I made sure to also just practice doing maths without a calculator because I hadn't had to do that for a year!
Another thing I did was to go through the spec and make sure that I fully understood all of the concepts that came up, as I hadn't covered some of it in class yet.
It sounds cliche but try not to panic - they don't want to break you or ask you questions you can't answer, they truly want to get a sense of how you'd work through a question. Making mistakes is okay!