Oxford and Cambridge interviews: what happens and how to prepare

What happens in the interview?

Oxford describes its interviews as academic conversations about your chosen subject, similar to a short tutorial, usually with two tutors, and you may have more than one; a joint course is interviewed by tutors from each subject. Cambridge says most applicants have one or two interviews lasting between 35 minutes and an hour in total, some have three or four, and there are usually two or three interviewers.

Both use material you have not met before: a problem, a passage, a picture, a set of data. Cambridge puts it as applying your knowledge to new situations, materials, problems or scenarios. For many arts and humanities courses at Cambridge there is also a short written assessment set by the college at interview, with no registration beforehand.

Are the interviews online?

Oxford says its interviews for 2027 entry will be held online. Cambridge’s main interview period is 7 to 18 December 2026, and the format depends on the college: some interview everybody online, some in person, and some decide by where you live, and you will not usually be able to ask for a particular format.

For an online interview it is worth testing the camera, microphone and connection beforehand, and having paper and a pen to hand, since you may be asked to work something out.

What are the interviewers looking for?

How you think, much more than what you already know. The interviewers are the kind of people who would teach you, so they are seeing what a tutorial or supervision with you would be like: whether you engage with something unfamiliar, reason out loud, take a hint when you are stuck, and change your mind when an idea does not work.

A wrong first answer that you then improve is usually a better interview than a right answer given with no reasoning. Being stuck for a moment is normal, and saying what you are thinking while you are stuck is exactly what they want to hear.

How should you prepare?

Know your own application well. Reread your personal statement and any written work you sent, since interviewers may pick up something you wrote, and be ready to talk about the reading or projects you mention in more depth than the statement gives.

Practise thinking out loud, which most people find uncomfortable at first. The universities publish their own help: Oxford has sample interview questions and demonstration videos, and Cambridge has an interview preparation page. The kinds of task you might meet include a graph or a small data set to interpret, a short passage or poem to discuss, an object or image to reason about, or a problem to work through step by step with the interviewer adding hints.

Do not memorise answers. Rehearsed answers are easy to spot, and the questions are chosen so that a script does not help. Cambridge also says that using AI during an interview is prohibited, that interviewers check for it, and that sharing assessment or interview questions is strictly prohibited.