Linguistics Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews
Interview 1: more philosophical questions about language; Interview 2: more academic, linguistic excercises
Researched linguistics; Watched an example interview
Completed past papers
Make sure to demonstrate your enthusiasm and read around interesting topics
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: 50 minutes
Length of interviews: 30 minutes
Online interview:Yes
The interviews were heavily structured, and there wasn't really much room for free conversation.
My first interview mostly asked me general, more philosophical questions about language (some were very challenging – probably intentionally so! Make sure you can keep cool under a bit of pressure), and related aspects of my personal life, school studies, and things I had written about in my personal statement to linguistics.
My second interview was more academic, conducted by two linguistics
The point of this isn't to get them all right, but for them to see what happens when you're stuck, and your reasoning for your answers.
Since linguistics is a new subject to every undergraduate, there's nothing you're necessarily required to know in advance – so research and learn about the areas that interest you! I read textbooks on linguistics, learned about languages that I found interesting, and looked up an example linguistics interview on YouTube (there's one published by Churchill College).
Practice papers are useful to understand the general contents of the test, whereas past papers for things like linguistics olympiads are useful for the sort of problem-solving you need to do. Making sure you have a passion and an interest in language is super important, and the excitement should come across in your essay! You'll write better if you're interested in what you're writing about!
For linguistics, go into your test and interviews with confidence and enthusiasm. While they're not attempting to measure your knowledge on the subject, by all means demonstrate your enthusiasm by reading around topics you find interesting! As with all things in Cambridge, you won't get it all right, and it's how you cope with being stuck or getting an answer wrong that counts.