nevertheless, people should remember that it is only one aspect of the application, or so we were told. all the paper parts of the application are still being considered; they’re not just a preliminary hurdle to pass over in order to get an interview. although it varies by subject, oxford does, in addition to interviews, gather extra information about candidates from tests and written work. all of this one hopes would allow them to make a more accurate judgement about who is the best candidate.

i would at least have to say that it is a better than the system used by almost all other universities, where the only factor is the quality of your ucas form. extremely competitive unis like LSE then have to differentiate between excellent candidates on the basis of the most trivial differences in their personal statements or references. well, that or just ip dip doo :/

You can coach and prepare for interviews too.

I remember interviewing for a job in my last year at uni. One interview, I did so badly I would not have hired me. A very similar interview two weeks later I aced it, and got the job offer even though they couldn’t get in touch with my referees (who had both decided to go on overseas trips at the same time).

The difference was that I was more prepared and had had some practice.

The number of human activities that can’t be coached for are very small, I can’t think of any once I leave out behaviours that are outside our conscious control, like digesting food.

I think I had exactly the reverse perception of “class” at university: I am a working-class – not even respectable-working-class – child from a not very nice council estate in a very depressed (in the 80s) northern town, my parents being unemployed for the whole of the 1980s after my dad was made redundant (and he never worked again), but I went to a local private day school on the old Assisted Places scheme. I got very fed up, in the early 90s when I was an undergraduate, of meeting people who were nth generation Oxbridge but who thought they were the vanguard of the revolution because they’d attended state schools (usually, in their case, rather nice schools in leafy suburbs). I like to think I’m slightly calmer about this nowadays.

But for every individual trying to make things different there is one who is barely going through the motions. AAt the very first supervision I went to, the tutor went round the room asking people where they came from geographically, and then named the major private school in that area and asking to be remembered to so-and-so teacher. He went conspicuously quiet when I said “Teesside” and ignored me entirely thereafter. I hope to god that he had nothing to do with admissions at his college.

And it is avery relevant point that has been made about admissions from state schools absolutely not necessarily meaning admissions from working class backgrounds. I’ll wield my class credentials by saying I was from a crappy (Middlesbrough) comprehensive school, not a grammar school, and then spoil it entirely by ‘fessing up that my parents were university educated teachers and I have several generations of Cambridge attendees amongst my forebears (I wore a 100 year old hood to my graduation for goodness sake) – and I still felt lower class than most of my college companions who went to grammars or private schools.

When I went through this mill, I had been warned by my teachers and my parents of the public-school bias I might encounter. Admittedly I spent those years with my head perpetually in the clouds, but I was struck by the almost total lack of it. Maybe I was helped by my youngest-sibling ability to bluff (hand-waved the 3D ham-sandwich theorem for the maths tutor, had a good-natured argument about politics with the admissions tutor).

This was in 1984, in the CCE days, so by the time I came to interview they were inclined to admit anyway.

When actually at Cambridge, I found that parts of it were more rabidly class-riven than others. So maybe my cruise through admission is down to the guidance I received on college selection, from the one teacher in my sixth form who had any experience of Cambridge.

[State comp, Clare ‘86, Maths, I].

Chris @ 40: there just aren’t many working class applicants, I think, so it’s hard to say much about their chances. We obviously don’t have parental occupation data in front of us, but I think that e.g. the applicants from “worse” schools tend to be the offspring of teachers, librarians – people with college degrees. Indeed I think that’s what Harry B described above about his own offer? Class is almost entirely acting (“acting”) prior to admissions rather than in place of it, I think.

Interviews, I think, are terrible (and very demanding of time), albeit carried out with the best of intentions by well-meaning people, usually themselves from middle-class backgrounds. I am not convinced they are worse than the very clear class biases that obtain in e.g. examination results.

Allison @ 33: there are all kinds of dodgy product that get sold, aren’t there? I think this is one of them. None of these firms produce much evidence that their advice improves the chances of applicants (from what I’ve heard their advice doesn’t seem worth paying for), but they sometimes do things like offer a refund if the client doesn’t get an Oxbridge offer. Which means that as long as a decent number of applicants buy their advice, and some of them get in, the firm does OK regardless of how good that advice is. I would like to see universities do more to try to provide good advice for free.

Look, quotas, it’s the only solution.

I think that, to be fair to rob, “thinking on your feet” may be being used as a shorthand for “responding intelligently to a problem within your subject area which has significant qualitative differences from any problem which which you have been presented before”. Of course, it is true that a candidate who has been drilled more intensively will have seen a larger variety of topics and it will be harder for the interviewer to find a novel area, but the interviewer may still invoke the honour code and ask if the material is familiar to the candidate.

This observation is from my own personal experience of being asked about Koch’s snowflake curve when interviewed in maths at Cambridge in September 1982.