Oxford History Students and Applicants

I think under Freedom of Information shizz you are allowed to request your results, but you will have to contact the admissions office of the college you applied to and go from there. As far a I am aware they do not automatically send them to you.
If you wanted feedback as to why you were unsuccessful then you can also ask for a more general overview of your application, but I would suspect that you have left it too late now to get anything that is genuinely useful. I can't imagine that tutors hold on to interview notes for this long, but I may be mistaken.

Yeah, I asked for the general information about my application straight away (i.e. within a week of getting the rejection, I think), but they said that they couldn't provide any detailed information on the reasons. Maybe I might have got further if I got my referee to ask. But hopefully the test results will still be around somewhere

OP did you just neg me. I wasn't lecturing you, I was just sharing my personal experience.

No, I didn't

are you sure. cos if you did, I wont neg you back.

Hey, I was just wondering if any current history students could possibly give me some advice on the different courses?

I was wondering what exactly quantification paper involves. Iv'e read what the history website says but I dont quite understand how it fits with history. I was just wondering if anyone could give me an example of what sorts of things it involves. How much maths is it, and I guess what I'm wondering the most do you actually learn about any period of history when doing it or is it simply teaching you a different way to evaluate history?

Also, I'm having a hard time picking which British and general papers to do! I understand that I have to take 1 module from each time period, but the only ones which cover the middle period are times which I have done for A-level. I know which modules I want to study next year, and so I have worked out that I need the combination of either british (300-1087) and general (1400-1650) or british(1500-1700) and general (370-900). Basically what I would like to know is, 1. Has anybody had experience of studying these modules, if so what did you think! and 2. How flexible are the teachers if you have studied something before will they let you look at something else in more detail instead?
It's a bit of a pain because they advice you not to study what you have at A level but to fill their requiments I'm going to have too!

Sorry for the long question I'm just looking for some extra advice or information because at the moment I'm just going round in circles, everything sounds so interesting!

Thanks!

The lecturer has changed since my year, but basically, we used statistical techniques to look at 19th-century data sets (Australian convict lists, British vs. Irish people living in London) and worked on testing hypotheses like whether there were wage differentials between them, or height differentials - and what that said about their health - or indeed what we could learn from their reported ages about their numeracy. As to maths, there's no actual pure maths, but if you've done A-level, it's very similar to S1 and S2, and fairly straightforward if you've done those. You don't really learn any history in particular, but that's not the point of Paper 4 - the same will be true of Approaches, Historiography or Foreign Text.



What's wrong with British 1042-1330, or General 1000-1300 (both of which count as your medieval paper) or with doing a modern paper in first year, then picking an early modern General paper in second year when they get much more specialised? I did none of the ones you're thinking of, but I think your mindset - "I've done this at A-level, can we have a week on something else?" - is the reason why tutors caution against doing A-level-like papers in first year; you're unlikely to have gained enough knowledge from A-level, or to remember enough if you have, to do well enough in an Oxford Prelims paper on it. If you can't do something entirely new, it's probably wise to throw yourself into your chosen paper as if it were from scratch, without relying too much on A-level knowledge.

do -not- read them all!
the point of history reading is to get you interested in it and stop your brain from shrivelling. pick one, maybe two books from each list which looks interesting, and don't read the whole thing - get the jist of the argument and read whichever bits seem interesting.

and if you're doing british history 1, don't read stenton.