The Student Room Group

What style of questions should I expect for Cambridge maths interviews?

Hi! I am applying to St Johns College, Cambridge, for maths this year and am wondering what kind of questions I should prepare myself for in the two interviews. One is on pure, the other is on applied. I am quite good at pure (have done a lot of STEP mocks already and am able to get 4-5 pure section questions fully correct each time), but am really not amazing at mechanics and statistics. I am taking FP1 and FP2 for context. I've looked at the TBO booklet but the problems honestly didn't seem very well posed nor in the STEP style. Should I be expecting a lot of combinatorics and probability, like in the TBO booklet, or more pure maths like in STEP? I have no clue as to the contents of the applied interview, any help in that regard would be much appreciated.
Original post
by EmmaBMaths
Hi! I am applying to St Johns College, Cambridge, for maths this year and am wondering what kind of questions I should prepare myself for in the two interviews. One is on pure, the other is on applied. I am quite good at pure (have done a lot of STEP mocks already and am able to get 4-5 pure section questions fully correct each time), but am really not amazing at mechanics and statistics. I am taking FP1 and FP2 for context. I've looked at the TBO booklet but the problems honestly didn't seem very well posed nor in the STEP style. Should I be expecting a lot of combinatorics and probability, like in the TBO booklet, or more pure maths like in STEP? I have no clue as to the contents of the applied interview, any help in that regard would be much appreciated.

I think the TBO booklet does a good job in some respects, but seems to (rather reasonably) emphasise topics that would be less familiar to candidates. I would say practicing graph sketching is a good idea if you haven't done much of it already, such as y = sin(x)/x or (e^-x)cos(x), etc.

Reply 2

Original post
by EmmaBMaths
Hi! I am applying to St Johns College, Cambridge, for maths this year and am wondering what kind of questions I should prepare myself for in the two interviews. One is on pure, the other is on applied. I am quite good at pure (have done a lot of STEP mocks already and am able to get 4-5 pure section questions fully correct each time), but am really not amazing at mechanics and statistics. I am taking FP1 and FP2 for context. I've looked at the TBO booklet but the problems honestly didn't seem very well posed nor in the STEP style. Should I be expecting a lot of combinatorics and probability, like in the TBO booklet, or more pure maths like in STEP? I have no clue as to the contents of the applied interview, any help in that regard would be much appreciated.

Hi, sort of unrelated to your question, but what are you doing for STEP preparation, and are you talking about STEP 1,2 or 3 papers that you have already been doing?

Quick Reply

How The Student Room is moderated

To keep The Student Room safe for everyone, we moderate posts that are added to the site.