What does a rock 

look like? 

Oxford reveals sample 

interview questions

How you listen to music, what a rock 

looks like, and what historians cannot know about the past are among this 

year’s list of sample interview 

questions published by 

Oxford University.

The annual release of interview 

questions and suggested ways of 

answering them are designed to 

prepare aspiring students for the 

ordeal of trying to get into one of the 

world’s most elite institutions.

Oxford’s director of admissions, 

Samina Khan, advises candidates not 

to be afraid to give plain answers 

at first. She said: “It is often best to 

start responding by making very 

obvious observations and building up discussion from there – solving the 

problem quickly is less important than showing how you use information and analysis to get there.”

Siân Pooley, from Magdalen College,

advised history candidates how to 

explain what they cannot find out 

about the past. “A candidate might 

start off by saying that they had been studying Tudor England and historians don’t know much about the lives of the poor because they were less likely to 

be able to write, ” she said.

“Given these lower levels of literacy, 

we could then talk about what sources historians can use to learn about the 

lives of the majority of the population 

in 16th-century England. This would 

require the candidate to think creatively about alternative sources (and their 

drawbacks), such as, for instance, 

criminal court records in which people who could not write were required to 

give oral testimony as witnesses.

“They might want to think about how 

structures of power have altered over 

time or about how social norms for 

what can be recorded and kept in 

archives have changed. This is the sort of conversation that no candidate 

could predict in advance.”