The Student Room Group

Interview for an access course in 90 MINUTES!!

How on earth can an interview at a college for an access course be for 90 minutes?! What will they be asking me and how do I prepare?
Reply 1
all colleges run differently with regards to their recruitment policy and how they interview and assess their prospective students.

most will include some kind of assessment to see where your english & maths skills currently sit at, and possibly some kind of 121 interview just to see if you have any further questions, and so they can see you are applying for the right course etc.

as for preparing yourself... ask yourself why are you applying for the course? what do you want to go on and study at uni? and what have you done previously etc. they will probably ask questions like that. just show you're keen and you're determined to succeed.

to be honest most FE colleges are pretty lax with their recruitment of new students and tend to accept most people that apply, they need the funding.
(edited 10 years ago)
At my college, there were level 2 assessments in English and maths, with a pass mark of 60%. If you failed one, you were allowed to do one resit. People who still failed by a small margin were offered the chance to do a pre-Access course instead.
Reply 3
Original post by Schadenfreude65
At my college, there were level 2 assessments in English and maths, with a pass mark of 60%. If you failed one, you were allowed to do one resit. People who still failed by a small margin were offered the chance to do a pre-Access course instead.


What were the questions like?
Hope it goes okay, my interview initially consisted of a Maths and English test... I don't know if I failed or not because they told me they didn't have a place for me, (I think honestly I was too young at the time as I was 18 and they tended not to take people under 21) but then this one guy stopped me as I walked out devastated and asked me if I wanted to try the Pre-access course. I honestly don't know where I'd be without him as he continued to teach me for two years after that - through the pre-access and I was lucky enough to get him again in the access course. In my interview they just asked me why I wanted to go back into education and that sort of thing but for my second application I didn't even have an interview because they knew me well by that point.
Original post by 4TSR
What were the questions like?


The English test covered spelling, grammar and vocabulary. For instance, there was one paragraph with all the apostrophes missing, and we had to fill them in. The maths covered GCSE type topics - probability, area and volume, percentages, etc. BBC Bitesize is a good place to revise the kind of questions we had.

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