Oxford PAT 2016

Thanks so much!

Hi guys,
As a potential applicant for 2018 entry to oxford physics, I was wondering if you guys have any tips on what I could to start preparing now for the PAT/a potential interview?
Also, if any have you have done any questions on Isaac Physics, what level of question would you say is roughly equivalent to the PAT in terms of difficulty?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

You're probably best off waiting until you've finished your first year (assuming you're doing A levels now) before you start to look at the PAT - for a start, there are a limited number of past papers, which are definitely the most useful resource. You also would need to self teach yourself an unnecessary amount of stuff if you start now (you'll have to do a bit anyway, but it's a bit of a waste of time to teach yourself stuff that you'll already learn nearly a year before the exam).

The best thing you can be doing right now for an Oxford application is concentrating on doing well academically, and also doing things to explore your interest in physics (e.g. reading around the subject - popular science books etc.).

Hi guys,
As a potential applicant for 2018 entry to oxford physics, I was wondering if you guys have any tips on what I could to start preparing now for the PAT/a potential interview?
Also, if any have you have done any questions on Isaac Physics, what level of question would you say is roughly equivalent to the PAT in terms of difficulty?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

I'd check your physics course. For example, at my school we do AQA Physics and you don't learn anything about circular motion, gravity, electric or magnetic fields in AS. None of these topics require any AS knowledge (the only stuff you really need is GCSE) and so you could start to teach yourself some of these. Obviously the topics depends on your exam board, but you can look in your text book for that.

Maths is a lot trickier as quite a bit of C3 and C4 knowledge comes up in the PAT, but you wouldn't be able to teach yourself these topics without C1 and C2. My main advice would be to do all the advanced level questions in C1 and C2 and get used to doing maths without a calculator (by that I mean be used to getting unusual answers as well be good at arithmetic). Also practice during weird graphs.

Also, do you take M1? Any work on that would be useful.

And in FP2 (doesn't require FP1 knowledge) there's a chapter for questions similar to 7<1+5x/(1+x). There's almost a question like that every year and the trick is that you need to square the (1+x) for ALL solutions (better explained in the book).

Good luck with all the work. Make sure you start early and save a few papers for nearer the actual exam.

Oh ok, right, thanks for the advice. Will take a look at the things you pointed out.

I would definitely say the physics section is harder than the maths. The questions are often very obscure even though they use pretty simple physical ideas. I would get good at problem solving, Professor Poveys book is very good.