The Oxbridge Interview

This lesson covers what the interview actually is: how each university runs it, how a single question unfolds over ten minutes, and what the tutors are looking for. Getting this right changes how you prepare. Most of what applicants worry about, such as obscure facts and trick questions, is not what is being tested.

The interview is run as a sample of the small-group teaching at the centre of both courses, called a tutorial at Oxford and a supervision at Cambridge. In a supervision, you and one or two other students hand in an essay or problem sheet, then spend an hour with an academic who questions you on it, pushing past what you wrote until you are reasoning about something new. The interview reproduces that for 20 to 30 minutes, using a problem you haven't seen. The tutors are usually the people who would teach you, so the question they are really answering is: would this person be good to teach, and would they get better with teaching?

This makes it very different from the MMI used at most medical schools. In an MMI, each station is a prompt you answer in a few minutes, marked against a scheme, and a clear prepared answer does well. At Oxbridge a question is the start of a ten-minute conversation. The tutors add information, ask follow-ups and keep going until you reach something you don't know. When that happens you are expected to say what you do know, take the hint and carry on, not give your best answer and move on. What is assessed is how you reason and how you respond to being taught, so reasoning out loud matters far more than a polished answer.

Interviewers have your personal statement and reference in front of them. At Oxford they are not told your UCAT score or which college you chose.

For an online interview you need a quiet room, a computer with a webcam, and paper and pens. You may be asked to sketch a graph or write out working and hold it up to the camera, and tutors often share their screen to show you a graph, a diagram or an image.

Academic and personal interviews

Not all of your interview time will be science. At Cambridge it is common to have one or two interviews focused on science and data, and another that is more personal: why medicine, your work experience, your personal statement, an ethical scenario or an issue facing the NHS. At Oxford these questions are more often folded into the science interviews, sometimes as a few minutes at the start or end, though some colleges give them more time. Your invitation will usually tell you what to expect.

These questions are much closer to the ones asked at other medical schools, and they count. A weak or unprepared answer on motivation or ethics can undo a strong performance on the science. So you still need to revise for the standard medical school interview questions, as thoroughly as you would for any other interview. Lesson 3 covers how.

This is the most useful thing to understand about the interview. Each topic is a chain of five to eight linked questions, and most chains follow the same shape.

1. 1.Anchor. A question on something you have been taught. It gets you talking and gives the tutor a shared starting point. "Describe how a nerve impulse travels along a neurone."
2. 2.Extend. A twist the syllabus doesn't cover: a new fact, an abnormality, a diagram. "In some diseases the myelin around nerves is damaged. What would that do?"
3. 3.Reason. Predicting consequences from your own earlier answers: a symptom, the direction of a change, a rough calculation.
4. 4.Stretch. Something nobody at school could be expected to know. You are meant to need help here, and the tutors watch how you work at the edge of your knowledge.
5. 5.Apply. Often, a return to a patient, a treatment, a test or an ethical question.

Two things follow from this shape. First, your early answers become the material for later ones, so a precise answer in the first two minutes makes the next eight easier. Second, reaching a point where you don't know is built into the design. It isn't a sign that the interview is going badly. It is where you are being assessed most closely.

Both universities say plainly that getting the right answer is not the point. Cambridge asks its interviewers to look for solid A-level science applied "to new scenarios and problems", and for candidates who avoid "jumping too hastily to conclusions". Oxford says: "the point isn't what they know, it's what questions they ask to make their conclusions, and how they interpret information."

In practice, the tutors are judging five things.

It also follows that several common beliefs about the interview are wrong:

• "It's a test of what I know." You won't be marked down for not knowing something beyond A-level. Tutors expect you not to know it, and will often tell you the fact and ask you to use it.
• "They ask bizarre trick questions." Mostly a myth. When a question does sound odd, there is almost always a piece of science underneath it. Look for the science and answer that.
• "Confidence is what counts." Confidence helps only because it keeps you talking. A quiet, careful candidate who reasons well does better than a fluent one who doesn't.
• "I'll know how it went." Tutors keep going until you struggle, so nearly everyone leaves thinking it went badly, including those who get offers. Being asked harder and harder questions usually means you got through the easier ones.

What does go wrong is silence. The weakest interviews are rarely the ones where a candidate gets something wrong. They are the ones where the candidate says so little that the tutors can't tell how they think or why they want to study medicine. A wrong idea, said out loud with a reason, gives the tutors something to assess.