2x 30 min interviews, 5 hours apart
Both interviews: follow-on questions from personal statement and broad inferences from images; Human Geography: political situation at time
Practice papers
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Revise and read about Geography; keep up to date with current affairs.
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
Skype interview: No
Time between each interview: 5 hours
Length of interviews: 30 minutes each
There was one interview for physical geography and one for human geography. Both involved some follow-on questions from my personal statement. Both also included discussion prompted by several images such as satellite images, photos or political cartoons. We were asked to make broad inferences from these images.
The human geography interview also incorporated some questions around the political situation at the time. One question in this area was very abstract, and I didn't grasp it completely and took a long time to answer it coherently. But the interviewer stepped in and broke down the question into smaller parts. It felt as if he was trying to let me demonstrate how I thought, and in that sense, it was helpful to think about the interview as a cooperative process of figuring out a response.
Similarly in the physical geography interview, I felt that I could tell when I'd said something that showed a deep understanding, because the interviewers would nod or smile, and that was enough to encourage me. It was probably the right decision to unpack all of my thoughts, ideas, areas of self-doubt and bits of knowledge in response to each question, as this honesty really showed the interviewers my approach to problems as much as what I knew. That said, I was still quite nervous throughout both interviews, but the interviewers understood this and were tolerant of it.
I took many practice tests.
I did
But I would say the best strategy for me was not to think about the interview but to focus on the content, and make sure I'd mastered it enough that I would feel comfortable commenting on it or summarising it. I bought two university-level textbooks, and tried to talk about what I was reading to other people who were interested in Geography in order to just practice being able to explain it. I focused on areas that I'd highlighted in my personal statement. I also definitely revised my Geography content from school.
Finally, it was worth keeping up to date with political, economic and environmental news. This was because the