Oxford and Cambridge medicine interviews: what to expect

How do Oxford and Cambridge interview for medicine?

Oxford’s interview timetable says every shortlisted medicine applicant is interviewed by two colleges, on Monday 14 or Tuesday 15 December 2026, and Oxford’s interviews are online. Its medicine admissions report for the 2025 round said each applicant was interviewed by two colleges, at least one interviewer was a practising clinician, and colleges interviewed without knowing the applicant’s college of choice or UCAT score.

At Cambridge each college interviews its own applicants, and their pages describe a similar pattern: Gonville and Caius two interviews of about 25 minutes, one with a medically qualified interviewer and one mainly academic, and St John’s an interview on aptitude for medicine and one on scientific reasoning, each about 20 to 30 minutes. The main Cambridge interview period is 7 to 18 December 2026, online or in person depending on the college.

This is quite different from the multiple mini interviews most other medical schools use, which are circuits of short timed stations on ethics, role-play and the NHS. If you have applied to both kinds, the MMI guide covers the other.

What are the tutors looking for?

Oxford’s course page says students are selected for their scientific ability and their aptitude for medicine, that applicants should show a realistic understanding of what a medical career will involve and the potential to become effective and caring doctors, and that all colleges use a common set of selection criteria. Caius says it looks for intelligence, imagination and flexibility of outlook, above all intellectual curiosity and a passion for science, and checks that your idea of medicine is realistic rather than romantic.

So the science interview is not about recalling facts but about using what you know from biology, chemistry, physics or maths to think through a problem you have not seen, and the motivation part is about what you have actually seen of medicine and what you made of it.

Questions Oxford has published

Oxford’s published sample questions include one from an Exeter College tutor: put Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa and the UK in order by crude mortality, the deaths per thousand of the population. Most candidates expect Bangladesh or South Africa to be highest, and are surprised to find it is Japan, with the UK second, because older populations have more deaths; the tutor says nobody is expected to get the right answer alone, and that the point is the questions you ask and how you interpret what you are told.

Another, from a Queen’s College tutor, asks whether it is surprising that viruses cause human diseases, when they depend entirely on human cells to reproduce. The tutor describes it as the start of a tutorial-style discussion, from why some symptoms help a virus spread to whether there could be viruses that infect us without causing disease and how you would find them, and says it is looking for problem-solving, critical thinking, curiosity, communication and the ability to listen.

The UCAT and written work for 2027 entry

Both universities use the UCAT, sat between 13 July and 24 September 2026. Cambridge says you must have registered by 16 September and taken it by 24 September, that for 2027 entry it will look at the overall cognitive subtest score and not the situational judgement score, and that there is no minimum threshold. Neither asks for written work for medicine.

Oxford’s medicine interviews are video calls without a shared whiteboard, so you may be asked to show rough working to your camera; have paper and a pen ready.

How to prepare

Practise reasoning about unfamiliar biology and data out loud: why an organ is built the way it is, what a graph of two variables suggests and what else could explain it, how you would test an idea. Read around one or two areas you find interesting, beyond the A level course, so that you can talk about them for a few minutes and answer follow-up questions.

For the motivation part, think about your work experience or caring roles in terms of what you noticed and what it taught you about the job, as you would for any medical school, and be ready to say why you want the Oxford or Cambridge kind of course, with its science-heavy early years.

With an account, cookie’s Interview prep runs a mock Oxford or Cambridge interview in this subject with an AI interviewer. It writes problems in the style of the universities’ published examples, not real interview questions, gives a hint when you go quiet and writes a report at the end. It uses credits, and it is for practising beforehand: Cambridge says using AI during an interview is prohibited.