Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews
Explaining biological diagrams, graph sketching, describing mathematical reasoning
Practise A level questions (particularly challenging ones)
Practise explaining your thought process, don't just regurgitate material
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: 30 minutes
Online interview: No
We talked about modelling equations and data. The interviewer would give me a biological diagram and ask questions about it, including asking me to sketch graphs and explain mathematical reasoning. A lot of the content was loosely linked to A Level topics but it relied a lot more on understanding, comprehension, and working with a new topic rather than memory recall. There wasn't really a separate theme for each interview. I was obviously tense at first but as the interviews went on I mostly relaxed. The format was more of a discussion between us rather than question-answer. I had to do a lot of explaining my thoughts in between giving answers which allowed for the interviewers to explore the topics a bit more.
For the NSAA, it's largely based on A-level material, with a bit of deeper thought. Just practise the kind of questions you find at the harder end of papers, and revise the topics you struggle with, but don't sweat it too much, it's fairly difficult to prepare for anyway.
For the interview mostly I would say to practise explaining why you think what you think - obviously in science a lot of things you just "know" but practise explaining your thoughts. There was a lot more reasoning in the interviews than there was reeling off facts and equations.