Interview structured around personal statement and submitted work
Went over personal statement, submitted work, and assessment
At-interview test
Don't be discouraged if you don't know the answer to an interview question, work through it slowly
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: At-interview assessment
Number of interviews: 1
Time between interviews: N/A
Length of interviews: 45 minutes
Online interview: Yes
Firstly, there were NO TRICK QUESTIONS, despite the rumours online about this being the case. My interview was structured around three themes I used in my personal statement and submitted essays.
In each section, they asked me about definitions of key words I used, and then went into more challenging, theoretical questions about the topics. They didn’t show me any new material, we only covered what I had already written. I was very nervous, but I settled into it after a while.
They were probing for discussion, not trying to trip me up. That being said, their questions were quite insistent, and they ask a lot of them, so be prepared to answer many in a row with little feedback/reaction.
Before my interview, I had to submit my personal statement, two essays, and the answers to my at-interview assessment questions. The most helpful thing was going over the arguments I made in each of these pieces of work, and making sure I knew about the scholars I included in them all.
Refreshing my memory on the books I used in my personal statement was useful too, since they structured the interview questions around these. Also, if possible, getting someone to create a
My test was at-interview, rather than pre-interview, so I couldn’t really prepare for it
My big piece of advice for the interview is to not get disheartened when you can’t answer a question. My interviewer skipped through the easier questions I could answer quickly, and asked me lots of really hard ones, not because they wanted to catch me out, but because they wanted to challenge me.
Your interviewer won’t expect you to know everything, and it’s completely fine if you don’t! Just ask for clarification and work through it slowly. Breathe, take time, and smile if all goes wrong.
Other than that, believe in yourself, don’t take the whole application process toooooo seriously (it’s not life or death), and good luck!!