Linguistics Admissions Assessment (LAA); 1x interview.
Interview: Personal statement discussion, dataset interpretation.
Being familiar with books/articles mentioned in the personal statement; mock interviews.
Don't be afraid of not knowing something in the interview. Don't over-prepare, but know your personal statement well.
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: 1
Time between interviews: N/A
Length of interviews: 30mins
Online interview: No
My interview was initially focussed on my personal statement and the ideas I put forward in it. They asked questions to get me to expand on my ideas and see to what extent I had developed them. We also discussed my choice of subjects in my last year of high school and what I thought their relevance was to Linguistics. Then I was given a few datasets and asked to interpret them, receiving feedback from my interviewers. If I said I didn’t know something or didn’t understand a part of the data, they pointed me in the right direction.
Discussed what to expect with
Read every book/article mentioned in my personal statement, made sure I was very familiar with my statement.
My head of year contacted someone who had studied and taught philosophy at Oxford to conduct ‘
Tried questions from Linguistics admissions test from previous year.
Don’t prepare too much — you don’t know what questions you will be asked, and preparing too intensely might lead you to answer questions you hoped to get rather than the questions you are actually asked.
Be very familiar with your personal statement, and any ideas and opinions you mention in it. Obviously make sure you’ve read every book or article and seen every movie you mention in it.
Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know something — you will be asked questions you don’t know the answer to because the interviewer is trying to see how you cope with being in intellectual territory you are unfamiliar with.