What if my Oxbridge interview was really easy?

Perhaps the most confusing experience we see from post-interview applicants is feeling like they found the whole process much easier than they had expected it to be; that they weren’t properly challenged by their interviewer and haven’t had the proper chance to show their true potential.

If this sounds like you, the first thing to remind you of is that, just because you didn’t feel like your questions were as challenging as they could have been, it doesn’t mean that the interviewer couldn’t properly assess your ability to succeed in an Oxford or Cambridge setting. IT may just be that they had already seen enough in your admissions tests, written work, and personal statement, and didn’t necessarily feel the need to test you much further in the interview. The interview, without considering the challenging questions, was a chance for your tutors to see how your working relationship might go, and to see whether your styles of thinking align in person as well as they appeared to on paper.

What is frustrating is all the hard work that you’ve put into your application – all that reading, revising and discussing. Like any exam, there will be things that you prepare for, which don’t come up – it’s inevitable (and better that way round than the other). You may also have mock interviews which really challenge and push you, which may make the real thing feel like a walk in the park. Hopefully, you’ll have enjoyed all the work that you’ve done regardless of whether you were able to use it directly in the interview – you are supposed to like your subject after all!

Just to give you a quick example – and another lesson in never trying to second guess what the interviewers are thinking – one student we supported only had one 15-minute interview in which they asked her why she wanted to read that particular subject and what she was going to be doing on her gap year. She wasn’t given any unseen materials, wasn’t asked any challenging questions and her school was on the point of complaining to the college when she was given an unconditional offer.

The main takeaways here are just to keep going as you’ve prepared and to proceed without trying to pre-empt what the tutors are thinking - you never know what they might be thinking!