MML Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews.
Interview 1: grammar problem solving, personal statement; Interview 2: discussion of submitted work.
Review personal statement.
Past papers.
Practice articulating your thoughts aloud.
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: An MML paper on my interview day
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 2 hours
Length of interviews: 25 minutes
Online interview: No
My first interview was for French. First we went through the exercises that I’d had half an hour to do before which were the analysis of a French text and then quite a lot of grammar work. We then moved on to discussing a section of my personal statement that the interviewer had found interesting and discussed why I had chosen my subject. I enjoyed this part of the interview quite a lot - both my interviewers were really lovely and it was just like having an interesting conversation. I then was asked a question and had to spend a minute or two speaking french in response.
My second interview was for Italian, but I had applied to start it from scratch at uni, so there was no oral or grammar work. We discussed previous languages I’d studied and why I’d chosen Italian, as well as a piece of work I’d had to send in prior to my interview.
I made sure I was really confident talking about all areas of my personal statement (read all the books you say you have!) and had a few interesting things to say about each book I mentioned. I practiced a lot of grammar. I also made sure I had an awareness of at least one recent news article for both languages.
See past papers and practice skills you might be less familiar with, for me it was the language analysis part.
My main piece of advice is to be someone they would want to teach - they don’t expect you to know everything, so don’t act like you do! Say if you don’t understand something, being engaging and asking a question or two is much better than seeming arrogant. Also realise that there’s quite a lot of opportunity for you to control the direction of the interview, firstly with what’s in your personal statement and through the way you answer questions. It really is just like an interesting conversation and no one is trying to catch you out. The main goal of the interviewers is to see how you think and often how you respond to new information that they present you with, so verbalise your thought process as much as possible.