School Gate blog: Maximise your chances of getting into Cambridge

Bona Boraliu, a clever, outspoken 19-year-old from London, was furious last year when she wasn’t offered a place to read politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. She was an A-grade student from a grammar school, and had a glittering CV – so what went wrong?

“Almost certainly the interview,” says Boraliu, who had applied to Worcester College. “I was really annoyed. They threw something at me in a hot, stuffy, book-lined room that I hadn’t been taught in my economics course. I hadn’t been coached for an interview and I hadn’t been prepared to discuss something as obscure as game theory. Should a university place really depend on an hour’s chat?”

By Wednesday, about 30,000 sixth-formers will have applied to study at Oxford and Cambridge next year. Like medical schools, our most ancient universities demand applications by October 15 – three months before they are due in for any other degree course. And they insist on interviewing every candidate under consideration.

The advice that Boraliu, now a second-year government and politics student at the London School of Economics, offers to teenagers facing university interviews this autumn is “to practise”. Getting through the interview, she says, “is not a test of intelligence”.

It’s a view shared by Anna Nagle, a mother of four who helped her twin daughters secure places at medical school by holding mock interviews at home. She would rise at the crack of dawn to peruse websites where would-be medics shared their interview experiences – and then hurl questions daily at her girls. One of the questions asked at a real interview, she recalls, was: “If your mother was tied to a railway track next to a crashed bus full of children, and a train was approaching, who would you save first?”

Her efforts paid off, yet many parents remain baffled by the whole process. What should their teenagers expect – and how should they prepare?

There is an old story about the admissions ritual at Peterhouse, Cambridge. When a candidate entered the room, the story goes, someone would kick a rugby ball towards him. If he caught it, he was in; if he drop-kicked it back, he won a scholarship. No one suggests that happens now, but tales still circulate about baffling questions posed by dons . So You Want to Go to Oxbridge? Tell Me About a Banana . . ., a book that purports to open up the admissions procedure by listing “typical” questions, has merely added to the mystique by claiming that one candidate was asked: “What is the most interesting thing about a squirrel?” And what on earth is the right answer to: “If ancient history was a shape, what shape might it be?”

Next week, in an attempt to standardise its admissions procedure, Oxford will announce that all dons are to be put through training sessions to remind them how to interview fairly and well. The online courses will feature videotaped interviews between dons and candidates – and parents and teenagers will also be able to log in.

“There is a lot of mystique about what an interview is going to be like,” says Mike Nicholson, Oxford’s admissions spokesman. “Hopefully, this will take away the smoke and mirrors and show kids that there are no tricks involved.”

Mark Wormald, a biochemist and Corpus Christi fellow who has been quizzing students for 20 years, is one of the dons who has agreed to be filmed. He hopes the video interviews will help dons – especially new lecturers – as well as students. “They are as scared as the candidates,” he says. “A lot of them are petrified they will make a mistake – that the wrong people will get in and the right people won’t.” Does he ever ask questions such as: “Tell me about a banana?” Well, he says hesitantly, such questions only seem daft because they’re taken out of context. Wormald’s view is that the interview is best approached as a mini-tutorial – those hour-long one-to-one weekly chats in which dons push undergraduates to think about topics in new ways.

That’s why dons are so reluctant to jettison interviews. “They can tell us who will make our life easy and who will make it difficult when we teach them,” he says. “It’s like being a car mechanic: you need a tool kit. If you don’t have the tools, you can’t perform at interview at all. But if you have them at a good basic level, we will see whether you can use them to think about problems you haven’t [encountered] before.” Sometimes, he reveals, teenagers can break down in tears. How does he cope? “I say to them: if you want to cry for another five minutes, you can. If you want to ask questions, you can. Sometimes they go away, have a cup of coffee and come back.”

Is the training course for 1,600 staff a recognition that, in the past, some dons may have chosen the wrong students or behaved inappropriately? Not at all, says Nicholson, who was working at Essex University when Essex schoolgirl Tracy Playle fled her Cambridge interview in tears after bring humiliated by a don who mocked her accent. Playle went on to get a first-class degree from Warwick. The Trinity College don, Eric Griffiths, was barred from doing admissions interviews.

Nicholson also denies that the training is primarily focused on persuading dons to accept more state-school applicants. Oxford was famously criticised by Gordon Brown a few years ago for operating an “old boy network” when it turned away Laura Spence, a clever Tyneside comprehensive schoolgirl. And the university still gets an annual kicking from left-wing MPs when it publishes statistics showing that half its places are scooped up by privately educated sixth formers, even though they make up only 7% of the school-age population. Nonetheless, part of the new training does invite dons to reflect on these statistics, and on the state-private school breakdown for their particular college.

Are university interviews subjective, unfair and about as much help in choosing the right candidates as spinning a coin? That was certainly the view of Steven Schwartz, the former vice-chancel-lor of Brunel University, who was asked by ministers to look into the subject – and concluded that interviews should be scrapped.

Bearing this in mind, I ask Wormald whether he has ever got it wrong. “Oh, yes,” he says cheerfully. “We take four people a year at this college for biochemistry, and every three years or so I think: aah, here is one person that we didn’t evaluate properly. But there are no perfect systems.”

To watch the filmed interviews, visit the Oxford Learning Institute website at http://courses.learning.ox.ac.uk/login/index.php

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