The Oxford interview period is three days, or whatever indicated on the website - the timetable and procedure is all there, months in advance, so shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone now. The idea is that the colleges get all the interviewees in the same place at the same time. This is how I believe it works, but this is based on being the mother of an applicant three years ago and obsessively following TSR and various threads here.
E.g. St Mungo's has 10 places available for Mumsnet Studies. 20 people are invited for interview, one of them being Mary Smith. A schedule is drawn up for all 20 to have two interviews each over a 2-day period.
After the interviews, all the interviewers get together to compare notes. They may conclude that 5 applicants are not up to Oxford standard at all, 7 are great and they want to offer them places and 8 are Oxford standard but not top choice for St Mungo's - Mary Smith is in this group.
The St Mungo's Admissions Tutor for MN studies goes off to meet all the other MNS admissions tutors from the other colleges.They compare notes on all their borderline applications, so all the ATs consider whether they want to offer Mary an additional interview.
St Mungo's is still looking for its final 3 students and will therefore consider other colleges' borderline applicants.
By the end of the meeting, each Admissions Tutor will have a list of borderline people who will be having additional interviews at other colleges. They go back to base and the borderline people are given a time and college to report for another interview. (The very strong and very weak applicants are simply told at this point that they can go home.)
Mary is asked to go to Midge College for another interview, after which she is told she can go home.
The interviewers and ATs then get back together again, as before, to discuss how the second round of interviews went. Final decisions are made and notified early in the New Year.
So at this point the possible outcomes for each applicant are:
- Interviewed only at St Mungo's, no offer made.
- Interviewed only at St Mungo's, offer made by St Mungo's.
- Interviewed at St Mungo's and another college, offer made by St Mungo's.
- Interviewed at St Mungo's and another college, offer made by the other college.
- Interviewed at St Mungo's and another college, no offer made by either college.
- Very rarely, interviewed at St Mungo's and another College, offer made by the university of a place at Oxford, but with the allocation to a college to be made after the A level results.
(My son had outcome 4 and it has worked out really well for him.)
It sounds incredibly complicated written out like this and it must be a nightmare to co-ordinate but the huge advantage for the applicants is that the interviews are all over in one hit. At Cambridge this isn't necessarily the case because they have the so called winter pool, and may call people back for a second interview in January. If I understand correctly, at Cambridge you have all your December interviews at the original college and you might get a letter in January saying that they're not making you an offer but they've put you in the pool. You then have to wait for another couple of weeks for the outcome of that.
Of course, in both cases it is a lot more of a palaver than applying anywhere else. But at Oxford you are effectively getting a little taste of what it would be like to be a student there, which can be helpful in making a decision, if you get an offer, or get rejected and wonder whether to apply again.