Test taken: Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA)
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: The first was on a Monday afternoon and the second on Tuesday afternoon, so one day.
Length of interviews: The first was half an hour long and the second lasted 20 minutes
Online interview: No

In both interviews, each tutor (there were 3 in the first and 2 in the second) had a problem sheet that they gave me and I had to work through the questions, most of them were chemistry related obviously but there were a few maths one too. The first interview felt very conversational, I would say what I was thinking and the tutor would go on by asking me questions about my reasoning and about the things I had said. And I made lots of mistakes; one of the problems involved identifying an organic chemistry reaction mechanism, and I said what I thought it was and the tutor asked me questions about this mechanism for a good few minutes, before telling it wasn’t actually the right one. So that was a little bit scary but I managed to figure it out in the end and it was fine. For another of the questions, there were things I didn’t know so I just told the tutor that I couldn’t figure it out and so he told me the answer and explained it to me. And there was another where I almost said something completely stupid about a maths thing because I thought it was a trick question, but it wasn’t, and I caught myself before saying something very wrong. The second interview didn’t feel as friendly and conversational, I remember them asking me questions, me answering, and then them moving on to the next question without giving me any kind of feedback on my answer or continuing the interview by building up on what I had said like the tutors in the first one did. In terms of the level of difficulty, some of the questions had content that as an A-level student I wasn’t meant to understand, but it was about how I applied the knowledge I already had to it to try and make some sense of it, so it wasn’t that difficult in the end.

My chemistry teachers at school gave me a preparatory interview, which I was somehow a lot more stressed about than the actual interviews and it didn’t go very well. I didn’t have much material to practice with other than that, but I recommend going over what you did in Year 12, it helped me. The best advice going in was that ultimately it’s not about getting the questions in the interview right, it’s about showing your reasoning and how you think – the tutors want to know if their way of teaching is suitable for you.

I did lots of practice papers! I found them on the Oxford website page about the TSA, which you can find either by googling it or from the link given on the course description page in the section about tests you need to take.

Remember that they are interviewing to see if their system is suitable for you. That might not end up being the case, and that’s okay. But also remember that if you’ve made it this far it’s because you’re really good at your subject, and you know a lot of things about it. The interviews are there for you to show them what you know and most importantly what you can do with your knowledge: how you can apply it to solve a problem etc. And yes there will be some harder questions, but they put those in on purpose and they know you won’t know everything about them, but they want to see how you think around them with what you do know. And if like me you’re someone who freezes up when they’re really stressed, just take a few deep breaths before going in and remember that this isn’t a test and it isn’t about how many answers you get right, it’s an opportunity for you to show them how you think.