Giving feedback to Cambridge - 2018

Nobody from my college has heard either and it says on the email to contact them if you don't have it by the end of jan. Idk why it has to be so long after though.

Speaking from a medicine point of view, I believe that in order to assess a prospective medic's potential there should be more interest placed on the wider personality aspects as well as the scientific potential. The impression I gathered from my interview was that as long as I answered the scientific questions perfectly I could get away with having no empathy, respect for professionals and patients or having learned nothing from my work experience.
By focusing in standardising the interview process, the college I applied to has equated medicine to science, failing to recognise its very social and personal aspects.

I would like to provide feedback on how Cambridge provides interviews.

I am an international applicant and at some times Cambridge comes to my country to give interviews- however we are only given 1 interview as an assessment due to the lack of time constraints. I feel this is very unfair, especially since people in the UK have 2-3 interviews to impress the interviewers and show off the knowledge. I personally know one of my friends who got an offer that messed up his first interview, but recovered in his second and third and eventually got an offer. I had worked my ass off for the interview in my country but I was disappointed as my interview did not contain anything explicitly Economics related content (sketching graphs, prospect/behaviourial theories) and I felt like if given a second interview I would have a better chance to showcase more of my Economics knowledge/skill/intellect than if I just had one. I was lucky enough to be placed in the pool but I was eventually rejected, thank you so much to Cambridge for the experience because I have grown so much on that, but I do feel there are flaws when it comes to equal chance/consideration for all candidates- I feel the number of interviews given does reflect on that opportunity.

Hi there,

Thank you for setting up this thread. Will be more than happy to give my two cents on how the Cambridge application experience.

On international interviews, we were only given one interview as compared to our peers in the UK, who received at least two. While I understand this is due to manpower, time, and budget constraints, I do think it is a tad bit unfair to the international applicants, as we only have one chance to shine.

It is very much possible (as in my case) that a student might be having a horrible day and hence did not do well for the interview, and get rejected. However, they might have performed better if the interview was any other day.

Therefore, if I may propose, that all international interviewees be guaranteed at least two interviews, one in person and the other through Skype/online.

Furthermore, I do think Robinson College could have improved on their process of releasing the results. They were the only college to send out physical letters and only providing an email when requested for. I had to call them, incurring international phone charges, just to request for the email that every other College sent before.

Hope this helps, and once again thanks for the opportunity to provide feedback.

Overall, I can’t complain as I had a successful yet obviously stressful interview and application process, but there are a couple of things I’d like to mention:

1. To pick up on what someone else said, I’m an offer holder who had to fly 12+ hours for my interview as I am currently living overseas. Waiting for interview confirmation was rather stressful as I did not know until 16 January and needed to fly not long after - I think it would be good, albeit difficult, I know, to make sure that all international applicants are aware of their invitations/rejections earlier in order to book flights. What eventually happened is I booked my flights before I had proper confirmation which was the only way to ensure a space on a busy flight - obviously this worked to my advantage, but knowing even just 5 days - 1 week earlier could’ve been better.

2. The student interview help-desk was great on the night of my arrival, but a little more help/guidance when trying to go to different lecture rooms and interview rooms for at-interview written tests and actual interviews would have been helpful - perhaps having some help-desk students dotted around key areas would help in case an applicant got lost (me!) and needed to find a room quickly.

Thank you! It’s great to see the University take such an active interest in improving such a sophisticated admissions process!

I wish to preface my feedback by stating that I am very grateful that cambridge bothers to send an overseas team to interview in certain countries. I am speaking from experience having been a reapplicant, as well as hearing from many friends about their own experiences.

1. Overseas interview vs interview at Cambridge

Besides the fact that there is only one overseas interview (which I assume is because of time/resource constraints), the quality of that single interview in itself can be very different from the one at cambridge. Let me cite certain subjects as examples.

Law: people who interview at cambridge are typically, at the very least, given challenging subject interviews (like the one shown on the faculty's youtube page), whereas in my country, the overseas team typically asks very general questions (about their aspirations, extended projects, school activities) that seem to favour outspoken extroverted individuals. They only have one slightly related legal question (which is very simple as it merely asks for a regurgitation of the pros and cons for a particular debate).

My next point is even more significant - although I recognise that they may be experienced admissions tutors themselves, the overseas interviews are always very similar such that it confers a disproportionate advantage to 'good schools'. For example, in economics, the interview questions have typically been exactly the same for the past 5 plus years. In fact, I would be able to tell you the exact format/questions of the interview here if I really wanted to! It's almost always the same interviewer, and the questions repeat yearly. Any determined candidate/school can always ask past alumni about the exact questions and basically ace the interview. I personally know of candidates who knew the questions beforehand, and gamed the system by acting in the interview to show that he figured out the solutions on the spot to show his 'teacheability' and potential. This stands in stark contrast to the interviews in Cambridge, which is much harder to prepare for and more unpredictable. The cambridge interviews are a better test of one's potential and ability.

I understand that there has to be a structured set of questions for overseas interviews, and that Cambridge has made it compulsory for ALL overseas interview candidates to take admissions tests to make up for the single interview. I am also aware that my points above may not be true for the entire overseas team, but it is certainly true for some cases and worth looking at! The quality of the overseas interview has to match those who interview at Cambridge, which I believe it does not at the moment.

2. Overseas interview deselection

For this past cycle, in particular, I have noticed that more candidates have been deselected for overseas interviews because of ‘limited time’ and supposedly ‘stronger’ field of candidates. I know of friends who have perfect post-qualification grades but was deselected for an overseas interview in their own country where they are citizens, then subsequently offered an interview at Cambridge, and had to spend loads to travel halfway around the globe for the interview and finally receiving an offer. Clearly, they were not weak candidates on paper or otherwise.

Overseas candidates put in a lot of effort to submit their application much earlier in September to qualify for an overseas interview, and being deselected with no real reasons can be quite unfair, especially when they are not objectively ‘weaker’ than other applicants in that country. I am aware having an overseas interview team is a massive opportunity that we should be grateful for in the first place. But having said that, it is hard to understand why the overseas team could not have either a) sent one or two more interviewers (who could then interview tens more candidates) OR b) have each interviewer extend their current interview schedule for one more hour per day (which adds up to interviewing many more candidates as a whole). Since the candidates pay for their travel fees, financial reasons should not be a concern for why more interviewers could not be flown over. More importantly, I have read a previous post in an “ask an AT thread” where the representative mentioned he was part of the overseas team and plans to take the opportunity to have a day out to sightsee. That day of sightseeing could potentially be used to interview more candidates. Surely one more hour per day from their time is not too much to ask for, and inconveniencing one person is better than inconveniencing many more deserving candidates who then have to spend a lot of money to fly over to Cambridge.

3. Video interviews

Perhaps as some have mentioned previously, Cambridge could seriously consider Skype interviews. Each college handles their own interview process, but perhaps this can be provided as feedback for more colleges to consider Skype, which works the same way as a professional video conference and is free! Matters of security (i.e cheating in interview) or concerns over internet bandwith should not be an issue if Oxford can perform Skype interviews for internationals all these years. It just needs to be ensured that the Skype interview is done at a reputable organization/school.

That’s all I have, and thank you for being willing to ask for feedback! As much as this post might seem very unappreciative, but I am truly grateful because Cambridge is much better than all the other unis in terms of transparency in their admissions process and access outreach. Hope the feedback comes across positively, because in no way do I mean any harm.

I was a disabled applicant and would like to say that Cambridge was the best for that side of thing out of all my universities. The accommodation/adjustment during the process was fantastic: interviews had a big gap between them, I read the source I had to read in a room by myself (and someone supervising me), I had a quick chat with the disability resource officer (I think that was her title?) and was able to use the extenuating circumstances form. The latter in particular was important - some of my universities I applied to had one, some didn’t. I’ve got an offer, and my experience during my application has reassured me so much about the resources and reasonable adjustments available.

With that said, I had a minor issue with the extenuating circumstances form. My teacher and I didn’t know how much detail or information I should put. We didn’t know what it should include in terms of diagnoses, dates, attendance statistics, specific examples of the effects of my circumstances etc. I reckon my circumstances were straightforward to understand, yet it was still difficult to write - the diagnosis and other circumstances were easy to understand (and recognise their effects on my grades, academic life etc), but I wasn’t sure how concise or detailed I had to be, considering I had multiple extenuating circumstances. Someone with a referee with less knowledge of the circumstances, or in a more complicated position (like, idk, explaining the effect of a custody dispute during GCSEs or whatever) might have the true extent of the extenuating circumstances underestimated. If i had to do it again, I’d like an example of a response for the form, although of course it would have to be clear that it wasn’t a formula, everyone’s form would be different etc. I’m guessing it’s bether to be too detailed than too concise - if that’s the case, it would be great to have that written on the site.

I know this is a very minor point, compared to the really great experience I had of the application process!

Hello, Offer holder for law here.
I would say that my one complaint lies in the time between my interviews, as they were very condensed and thus I had very little time to make it between the two places(I was interviewed at Clare so there was a bit of a distance between the two courts) . Thus I would say that perhaps structure interviews with a better awareness of travel time, but other than that I really enjoyed the applications process and felt it was very useful and although stressful, sold the academic nature of the university well.

Hello everyone, congratulations to all who have received offers, and commiserations to those who have not.

Every year we have an internal review of the Admission round at Cambridge and for the past two years my predecessor at Christ's and I have used this forum to elicit general feedback on our process from students who had gone through it. The feedback was very helpful to us in (we hope) improving things, so I am doing it again this year.

I am not in a position to provide feedback on individual applications or say why you didn't get in but rather this is an opportunity for you to say if there are things about the process that might be improved and make comments I can then pass on. I will also try to explain some things which might seem odd about the process.

The thread will be open for ten days and I will then report back to my colleagues with good points. Thank you for your points and also for the applications.

(And please don't be offended if there are some delays in replying - I'm currently in South East Asia so in a different time zone!)

Hi! I think overall Decision Day specifically went well, so congratulations to all the admissions teams Although I presume the "non-standard" approach by Robinson's, letters but no email, has already been noted for review.

Also I think a few colleges had incorrect or out of date info specifically about Decision Day. It would be good if the university agreed a best practice and encouraged all colleges to follow suit.

And I do agree with others that interview invites do sometimes come at short notice, especially for internationals. Actually it might be worth advising all internationals to apply for visas (when necessary) in advance of receiving an official invite.

Indeed, I'd have thought that interview candidates are identified reasonably far in advance of the actual interview timetable being decided, so those candidates on the "short list" could be sent a pre-invitation note (perhaps including a range of possible interview dates). Internationals could then start sorting out visas, and everyone else would at least know the formal invitation will be following in due course.

Also is there an agreed best practice for college feedback? I get the impression it can be rather variable in content across the colleges. It's understandably a huge undertaking, but a common format might help both the writers and the recipient (on what to expect).

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At my interview, Upon arrival i found out that one of the interviewers was unable to attend and would be present Via Skype.
This may not seem like a big deal to most, but considering I had spent the weeks before practising and solving problems as if i was in the physical presence of two people, it threw me right off.

I had prepared for an opportunity to communicate on many levels, both physical and mental, where they could see my written workings, and here i was, nothing more than a 2d image on their screen. This led me to spend an great deal of mental energy on trying to figure out how best to express myself, which inevitably meant i spend most of the time trying to verbalise every single conceivable thought instead of actually using that energy in approaching the problem as i would normally. Having to constantly measure my pitch, tone and volume in order to be effectively heard, I felt i was disadvantaged.

You could argue the other interviewer was the 'physical presence', but that person was not the one whom had designed and set the question I was currently being asked, and was therefore not the MAIN person assessing me at that given time. I feel it would have been fairer had they postponed my interview and rescheduled it.

Two things really,
(1) being please more practice papers for ENGAA (and the NSAA as other replies have requested).

(2) being that, well I don't know, my first pair of Engineering interviewers at TrinHall was very nice and supportive, but the same cannot entirely be said for my other pair of interviewers. They were looking at their screens at something and weren't particularly interested in hearing my thoughts it seemed. They were probably very busy with other things - admissions are a bureaucratic nightmare for everyone - but that was very discouraging to see and certainly have hindered my performance. Nonetheless I enjoyed the overall experience despite getting a big fat rejection.

I'm glad Decision Day was smoother this year, in general.

There's no such thing as "the University" in this context, unfortunately. The colleges collectively agree best practice, but we're not bound to follow it, and every year a few wheels fall off... All I can say is that the number of falling wheels seems at least to be diminishing.

I'd be a bit reluctant to encourage all international applicants to apply for visas in advance, given how high the costs of a visa application can be. The timescales associated with the pre-interview assessments also mean that we are often unable to determine how viable a particular candidate is likely to be, until 2-3 weeks before the interview date. We did invite candidates from countries known to be slow at issuing visas early, this year, but I don't think we'll ever be able to extend that practice to all international applicants without wasting a lot of our (and their) time on students who are not realistically going to receive an offer. Skype might be part of the solution here.

We did set up a working group to look at feedback, last year, which circulated guidelines on best practice and some sample letters, so hopefully there will be some improvements on that front this year!

I'm not sure if this is a popular opinion, but would it be possible to revert back to decisions being given before the Christmas holidays?

My main complaint is that my ucas track still hasn't updated and I haven't received my letter so I have no idea what grades I need yet. I know it's not going to make any difference when I find out, it's just an agonising wait. One thing I would say is that with the decision emails, I don't know if it should say you were unsuccessfully pooled if that was the outcome.

Speaking from a medicine point of view, I believe that in order to assess a prospective medic's potential there should be more interest placed on the wider personality aspects as well as the scientific potential. The impression I gathered from my interview was that as long as I answered the scientific questions perfectly I could get away with having no empathy, respect for professionals and patients or having learned nothing from my work experience.
By focusing in standardising the interview process, the college I applied to has equated medicine to science, failing to recognise its very social and personal aspects.

Hello there!

I shall begin this by thanking the University for giving us the opportunity to receive feedback on our application: it is very valuable for future applications.

First of all, there was not much material to prepare for the ECAA test, which Economics applicant had to sit. In particular, the 2^nd part was quite different from the previous papers available on the website. Although it was stated that no previous preparation was needed and that these exams are challenging by nature, I found myself struggling more than I had expected. As Economics is not offered as a study subject in my school, I am not used to write essays on the subject and I believe some extra preparation would have helped me. I did exercise on previous TSA papers, but the essay was structured differently. (I did not buy the sketchy pre-interview assessment guides available on Amazon, but I am quite sure that was not the reason I struggled )

I am extremely grateful to the Colleges for providing free accommodation to the interviewees and I shall never forget the beautiful experience I had there. However, I was not really sure how to prepare for the interviews. Here on TSR, I read that many people had mock interviews with their teachers on the subject. As previously said, I had no Economics teacher that could help me and my first interview of the kind was the one I had at the college. Consequently, I did not know what to expect and I found myself a bit confused especially during my 2^nd interview. On the invitation e-mail I received, it was stated that 20 minutes prior to the interview I would have had to do a “pre-interview reading”; however, no such thing happened (or, at least, not that I was aware of) and the moment I entered the room I was asked about my personal statement. I waited until the end to receive some material to read and analyse, but that was not the case. Again, I understand that the interviews are purposely challenging, but my second interview was just a bit “surprising”, so to say.

On a positive note, I found the University’s website to be very helpful during the whole application process, as I could not find any help at my school. Moreover, the college staff were generally welcoming and helpful. I must admit I would have loved to revise and have a look around in the Library, but I understand I cannot complain about that!

Lastly, I really appreciate this thread, as it shows that you value the applicants’ feedback, which is not common among universities.

I agree that ideally, there should be more material available to help applicants prepare for the ECAA test, but unfortunately, the test was only in its second year this year and the format has not quite "bedded down". This will have been taken into consideration by assessors when considering how much weight to give to test scores - and on the plus side, all applicants will have been in the same boat. Lots of applicants for Economics have not previously studied the subject, and the essay receives two scores - one of which is actually for use of language - so you may well have done better than you think.

It is difficult to create a level playing field where interviews are concerned, and I appreciate your anxieties. (It may not console you much, but many applicants who received "mock" interviews at their schools have told me that those interviews were nothing like the real thing, so I suspect the value of them is more in settling applicants' nerves, than actually providing relevant preparation.) There are films on the University (and some College) websites showing what to expect in an interview, but I agree we could think more creatively about this issue.

Where the pre-interview reading is concerned, it seems to me this was probably just an error by the College - many Social Sciences subjects do use pre-interview reading, and the Admission Office may simply have sent a generic e-mail to applicants in all those subjects, when in fact it wasn't relevant to Economics. But I'm sorry it unsettled you.

Thanks for your quick reply,

The e-mail I was sent had a link to a Dropbox folder with some files; among them was a table indicating the “interview requirements” (?) for each subject. For Economics, it stated “20 minutes of pre-interview reading directly before the interview with xxx. You must not arrive for your pre-interview preparation before the time stated in your call to interview letter.”. I even asked the Porter the time I was supposed to show up, just in case I misunderstood the message.

I'm glad Decision Day was smoother this year, in general.

There's no such thing as "the University" in this context, unfortunately. The colleges collectively agree best practice, but we're not bound to follow it, and every year a few wheels fall off... All I can say is that the number of falling wheels seems at least to be diminishing.

I'd be a bit reluctant to encourage all international applicants to apply for visas in advance, given how high the costs of a visa application can be. The timescales associated with the pre-interview assessments also mean that we are often unable to determine how viable a particular candidate is likely to be, until 2-3 weeks before the interview date. We did invite candidates from countries known to be slow at issuing visas early, this year, but I don't think we'll ever be able to extend that practice to all international applicants without wasting a lot of our (and their) time on students who are not realistically going to receive an offer. Skype might be part of the solution here.

We did set up a working group to look at feedback, last year, which circulated guidelines on best practice and some sample letters, so hopefully there will be some improvements on that front this year!