History Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews.
Interview 1 (Politics): personal statement; Interview 2 (History): discussion of a reading, submitted essays, and abstract questions.
Generating potential personal statement-related questions; A Level revision; keeping up with current affairs.
Stay calm and vocalise your thought process to the interviewers.
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: 1 hour
Length of interviews: 35 minutes
Online interview: No
Politics interview: the entire interview was the interviewers going through my personal statement, asking me questions from what I wrote about and then having discussions about topics that these questions led on to. There were two interviewers but they were very relaxed and it definitely felt a lot more like a back and forth conversation rather than an interview.
History interview: I had 30 minutes before the interview when I sat in a room with some pre-reading, some paper to make notes on and a dictionary and also a sheet they gave me with some things to think about whilst doing the reading. Then at the start of the interview we discussed this reading and then they gave me some more abstract questions which were connected to the reading. They then moved on to talk about some themes which had come up in the essays I had sent in before the interview, and then the last part of the interview was some more abstract and holistic historical questions which required the most thought and consideration.
I went through each sentence of my personal statement and made it into a question and then thought about how I would answer it. I looked back over all of the books I had included and made sure I was familiar enough to talk about them all. I made sure I was familiar with all of my A Level content and that I was up to date with current affairs, especially those in connection with areas I spoke about in the statement.
Practice papers, brainstorming ideas about the comparison of sources section of the exam and creating essay plans for the question and for the multiple choice question practising it first without time pressure to improve technique
The interviews were a lot less intimidating than you would expect and are more like a conversation. Try and keep as calm as possible - as much as