Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment (NSAA); 2x interviews.
Interview 1: questions on thermodynamics and graph sketching; Interview 2: questions on mechanics and calculus.
Practising Olympiad-style questions, and talking aloud while attempting them to simulate the interview experience.
Practise unfamiliar content and problems, though the problems you will be given are generally solvable with just A Level knowledge.
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: Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment (NSAA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: None
Length of interviews: About 25 minutes each
Online interview: No
Each interview was a 50-50 split, the first being chemistry/maths and the second physics/maths. In the interviews, the general format was that the interviewers (I had two for each) would describe a problem, and I would try to solve the problem while thinking out loud and doodling on paper. If I got stuck, or got something wrong, I could ask for help and the interviewers would guide me in the right direction. If I managed to solve the problem, the interviewers would modify it to be slightly harder, and if I solved that, they would provide a further twist, and so on. The questions were on thermodynamics and graph sketching in the first interview, and mechanics and calculus in the second.
There were no questions on my personal statement nor any other discussion besides solving the problems. Probably because of
The main way I prepared was by doing lots of Olympiad-style questions, such as Physics Olympiad or Chemistry Olympiad past papers. I think this was quite useful because it exposed me to questions much more difficult than in A-level, many of which I would initially have no idea how to approach, so in the actual interview I panicked less when I was given something really difficult, because I was more used to the feeling and felt more confident that I could slowly work my way into the problem.
I also practiced talking through my thinking process out loud when attempting these questions, so that I would feel less nervous doing so if asked to in the interview.
I think the main advice I would give is that the interviewers want to know how you think, and how you react when faced with unfamiliar content or problems, so I think it's good to try and put yourself in those kinds of situations when preparing - if nothing else it will make you a better problem solver to be used to tackling hard problems.
The main thing I'd change about my preparation is I wouldn't try to learn as much content beyond the A-level course, because I initially thought it would be impressive in the interview to have all this extra knowledge. However, all the questions were solvable with just A-level knowledge, and the thing they were interested in really was just your problem-solving ability. I also wouldn't have worried about my personal statement as much, because