Succeeding at a university interview is all about getting the correct answer, right? Wrong. Many students have the misconception that doing well at an interview means responding correctly to the interviewers\u2019 questions. However, spending three years on a College admissions panel at the University of Oxford showed me that tutors are much more interested in how <\/i>you think, rather than how much you know. They\u2019re looking for students who can consider a problem or an unseen text and think critically through the task, even if they give the wrong answer at the end. This is because at university you\u2019ll be faced with endless new material and knowledge, which you\u2019ll need to absorb, address and question. Tutors not only select students who can handle this amount of learning, but also those who are interesting and can produce robust arguments.<\/p>\n
So how do you acquire these skills? Fundamentally, you\u2019ll need to train yourself to think out loud, question what you learn, and take risks. If you\u2019re working on a science or maths problem, for example, talk through the task with a friend and explain how you\u2019d get to your final answer. If you\u2019re reading a current affairs article, find counter-arguments and articulate them out loud. If literature or history are more interesting to you, find some new material and try to work out what the writer is communicating and how. Practise as much as possible explaining your position to a friend and ask them to challenge your argument. At this stage, it doesn\u2019t matter too much who is right \u2013 the key thing is to argue, \u2018show your working\u2019, and support your points with evidence. Don\u2019t be afraid of taking risks or even being creative! At the end of the day, tutors want fun and curious students, not robots!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Succeeding at a university interview is all about getting the correct answer, right? Wrong. Many students have the misconception that doing well at an interview means responding correctly to the interviewers\u2019 questions. However, spending three years on a College admissions panel at the University of Oxford showed me that tutors are much more interested in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17503,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[865],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17504,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17502\/revisions\/17504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www23.i-learner.com.hk\/studiowebsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}