Applying to Oxbridge for 2023 the offers are coming in

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@Wildehorses your DS may have done better than he thinks, the PAT is notoriously twisty - but thought I'd just chip in to say I have a friend who did P&P at York 30 years ago and is now a senior academic at a prestigious institution in Paris. Oxford/Cambridge is never the only way!

@Karwomannghia Have you sen this YouTube video of a mock linguistics interview at Oxford:

Jesus College, Oxford has put a lot of effort into helpful videos

What I did to support my DC doing ML interviews last year was to google lots / watch various YouTube videos from students and put together a bank of questions and they used those to prepare.

If you know someone who is prepared to do a mock interview using this bank then that is great. Linguistics is quite niche so don't worry about finding a linguistics expert but someone who is used to interviewing would be fine and you provide the questions. The school may be able to offer a Governor or you may be able to ask a friend or colleague.

It will help your DC simply to be asked questions and have to vocalise their responses out loud (hope that makes sense!). All about going into the interview a little more relaxed so they can show their potential.

Below is some useful advice I scrapped off the internet last year - I think it may well have been from a Mumsnet Post.

Oxford Interviews

As some who was (but is no longer) an interviewer at Oxford, some perspectives:
1. Lots of people apply and the interviewers do their very best to make the best decisions.
2. However, apart from about 10% of the candidate who are clearly not actually able enough, and the 10% who are out and out geniuses, it is extremely hard to place every candidate in the remaining 80% in the perfect order. We do (did in my case) our very best.
3. The goal of the interview is not to find out how much the candidate knows. The goal of the interview is to determine academic potential and things like ability to learn (on the fly), ability to quickly grasp ideas that are new, ability to respond to discovering that you might have been initially wrong and so on.
4. Another thing that is being evaluated is how well the candidate will gain from the Oxford approach to learning: big lecture, self study, intense individualised pressured tutorials. It is, in effect, a mini-tutorial.
5. Therefore, it is true that if someone doesn't grasp the questions well, then the questions will get easier. This can mean that the interview seems to go well for the interviewee, but is a non-offer situation.
6. Every year, a reasonable number of candidate fail to get into Oxford and Cambridge, not because they are not good enough, but because there aren't enough places for those who are good enough, but aren't absolute geniuses. Scant consolation I realise.

Aptitude test day can be stressful, and sometimes that's reflected in discussions like this.
I think it's easier for candidates sitting certain kinds of of paper to know how they've performed. DD took the MAT two years ago, and although there was no official pass mark she already knew where the cut-off point for securing an interview was likely to be, and was quietly confident she'd comfortably exceeded that. I was far more jumpy about the interview stage of the process, as I hadn't dared to believe it would be pretty much all subject related (and frankly doubted her capacity to impress interviewers about a great deal else). But it was.

For NatSci at C, students were encouraged to "think out loud". DD1 was asked a fairly innocuous-sounding question but one where you needed to know a whole lot of information to answer it. DD's geography knowledge is abysmal and she needed to know one Geographical fact (more general knowledge really) but she explained that to answer the question, she needed to know X, Y and Z. They nudged her in the right direction, especially with the Geog/general knowledge bit to help her. She was also asked to write out the periodic table. Given that it was only a half hour interview, she didn't do the whole thing, but they were interested in how she approached it.

@Juja thats so helpful thank you! When we went to open day the tutor signposted him/us to a YouTube video with a specific professor too but it’s so useful to have the other ideas you have mentioned to get him to practise. I don’t want to jinx it by starting yet though (or waste time!)
thanks again.

Positive 'turn' here.
DD still in recovery from Covid. Sat TSA regardless and for that reason I love her more than ever.

Young people can be so brave!

Or it's simply good practice for what comes next. Dd had to sit her first year exams whilst isolating in her room whilst ill with Covid. She had 2 food deliveries each day from catering with whatever was available. They've pretty much all been through it.

DD4 had to do Classics Mods with the college ball in the middle of them. You're quite right HewasH20, they've all had challenges and had to develop resilience. It's called life.

Mmmm....
Hopefully 'life' going forward can be a bit brighter for young people.

Without the Tory cuts going forward.

All very well putting suffering down to 'life' but it shouldn't have to be this way actually.

Young people deserve better. Across the board.

And we shouldn't be reducing their lives to the lowest possible denominator.

There's been a pandemic. Shit happens. The young people shouldn't have had to suffer disproportionately but that was the the politicians decided should happen. Nevertheless they were all in the same boat. Time to move on. It's not the worst thig ever to have hit youth, historically.

*that was what

*thing

!

@HoneyMobster, would be interested to hear about your dc journey to Chemistry. Ds is considering this (but this is as far as he's got!). He's in Year 12.

I'm very glad to say that my experience of Oxford and Cambridge interactions is the completely understand what young people and their parents/carers have been through in the past few years. I'm glad of that. And also the commitment to higher education going forward.

Young people have had a disproportionately difficult time during the pandemic. I have eight DC, aged between seventeen and twenty nine when the pandemic hit in the UK. It's not possible to say that the current UCAS cohort have been any more disadvantaged than the other young people above them, all the way up to those in their thirties. It was shit for them all. But this cohort can't grab any particular victim prize, even though it's undeniably been hard. I mean, I think everyone is aware of the issues.

Hmm my DD state school had no online learning for a very long time, she pretty much self taught GCSE until school resumed.

This UCAS cohort have been significantly disadvantaged in their own right. But they have showed amazing reliance, something an entrance test can't measure.

It is not a competition and it is not taking away from the cohort above or below them.

However the phrase 'victim prize' is very unpleasant.

Resiliance not reliance!

It’s not unpleasant at all in that the phrase wasn’t used to accuse these young people of anything themselves, but it’s tedious when parents get competitive about which group of young people had it worse. Government policy chucked them all under a bus, and it was pretty much equally bad but in different ways.

We will have to agree to disagree. I find the phrase 'victim prize' unpleasant in any context.

Sure, no problem with that.

Dd has just received an offer from Bristol (History). Very relieved, massively takes the pressure off her Oxford application

Dd has just received an offer for History at Bristol - very relieved, takes the pressure off her Oxford application

Oops, wrong thread - twice!!

Good luck to all sitting the English Literature Assessment for C tmw.

DD’s plan to have a calm evening got scuppered when the date for the interview in December came through today along with the names of those interviewing her and she couldn’t resist doing a bit of background research. So much for a relaxing evening for her! Green tea has been supplied to her desk along with a suggestion she call the extra work a night.

@PettsWoodParadise how did your dc get on? I was also supplying green tea & snacks & calm hugs ? My dd quite enjoyed it

Awww thanks for asking, DD said she did 'fine'. She enjoyed the fact there were options for her to choose that she could really 'dig' into. Female issues half way through meant ten minutes in the toilet and I won't go into detail otherwise it will curdle people's mind before bedtime. TMI etc. But let's just say the circumstances were a bit of a mare.

Also the room set aside by the school was invaded by others no less than five times in the first half hour (despite notices on the door not to disturb and examination in progress) so DD was not impressed that school claimed their environment would be better than doing it at home. She also couldn't print out the works and annotate and had to hash that part, but she is so adaptable, I think all our DC who went through lockdown are adaptable, so feeling very proud.

How did your DD get on @beachcitygirl ?