Natural Sciences Admissions Assessment; 2x interviews.
Interview 1: general personal statement based questions, chemistry and physics; Interview 2: physics and maths.
Be confident in topics you mention in your personal statement, learn to structure your thought process.
Do questions from past papers (step and CTMUA papers can also be used)
Nobody gets everything right, and the interviewers are there to help you not trip you up!
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: a few minutes
Length of interviews: 35 minutes each
Online interview: Yes
We did talk about why I applied to Cambridge and
In terms of question types, the majority of my questions involved drawing and then using diagrams of some kind, whether it was drawing out graphs for algebra and mechanics, or looking at physical diagrams of objects for kinematics questions, or even circuit diagrams. It's important to be able to draw these diagrams out on Zoom (preferably with a drawing tablet), and to practise drawing things on the computer beforehand - for online interviews, that is.
The interview is of course meant to challenge you, but besides the questions themselves, everything else was seemingly designed to put me at relative ease. The interviewers were all very friendly, the process was well-signposted and it was less nerve-wracking then I had been led to believe. With that being said, the questions were naturally not easy. I didn't manage to answer everything, but I think what was important was that I was always at least writing something down, and detailing my thought process - if you don't give the interviewers anything to work with, they can't help you reach the solution yourself, and they are trying to help you, I promise!
In terms of any differences between my interviews, besides the content of the questions being slightly different (the first being general questions based on the personal statement, then chem and physics, the next being physics and maths), there were no major differences between the two.
The most effective preparation I did was going through example interview questions online, and learning to structure and lay out my thought process logically and clearly. It also helps if there is someone with you to act as the interviewer and
As well as practice questions, revision is of course also important. The two main areas of content I went over before the interview were a) the parts of the A-level course where I felt I was weakest, and b) parts that I touched on in my personal statement. Not all of my interview questions were relevant to the personal statement but several were, so make sure that you're knowledgeable about anything you have mentioned in it.
Do past paper questions and similar questions,
- Practise past questions as much as possible.
- Make sure you know about everything you mention in your personal statement.
- Have a bottle of water for the interview.
- Try to remember that nobody gets everything right, and that your interviewers are there to help you, not trip you up.