Oxford PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) Students and Applicants

I'm looking forward to the interview. Whether I get in or not, it'll be nice to stop worrying about Oxford (got enough to worry about in the IB to be honest). Going to send my work off soon, one of the essays is a bit poor (if we could modify them, I would make so many changes!), but I'm happy with the other.

Ahhh I completely messed up the essay!! I spent over five minutes planning out the advertisement question, after which I realised I was absolutely unable to phrase my thoughts in a coherent way and switched to the question on patriotism... By then I was in complete panic and just wrote things down without thinking them over, so my introduction was laughably weak, and halfway through the essay I realised I'd gone down the wrong path entirely and should have approached the question from a different angle, but by then I only had some ten minutes left and it was too late to do anything about it... Plus I wrote in pen (why? why??) and crossed out entire sentences and generally made a mess of the answer sheet. Christ I can't believe I ****ed it up so bad.

Do you think there's any way I could redeem myself with the written work? I usually do very well at essays, which makes failing the PPE test just that much more painful. I should have practiced beforehand; we get two hours to write at school and I just couldn't cope with the time limit. I'm absolutely kicking myself for being so damn unprepared now.

Ah, sorry for the rant, I just had to get this out of my system.

How important do you think the exam is in the admissions process, and how important has it been in the past? I heard a rumour that University College doesn't look at written work at all and bases decisions entirely on the test and the interviews. I did very well on the multiple choice part, probably around 90%, though it won't be enough to compensate for that atrocious essay. Christ, I'm not even half done with the application process and have already managed to **** up my chances.

(Enough angst, must get back to slaving on my EE now.)

I haven't chosen my essays yet. But never citated source material for homework; did anyone?! I definitely won't go through and do this. Would be far too difficult to retrospectively do so!

Well I said who I was quoting in my essay, but had no reason to do formal citation. Due to the "no editing for Oxford" clause, I didn't change this either.

Please do. The way I have looked at is to draw it out on lined paper - 3 lines for each step in one column, 2 lines per step next to it, and labelling which foot is landing at the end of each step on both. It is then obvious that the right foot land together every 4 (large [90cm]) steps.

Now, given that the distance required is 10,000 cm, 112 steps are required. It does not divide exactly, but as you say steps are discrete. 111 steps would be 9,990 cm, so to go 100m you need 112 steps.

If I am correct in saying that they land together every four big steps, the answer would therefore be 112/4 = 28 times.

But please do expand on yours, it's an interesting problem

anyone applying to pembroke college??

i used the 3.6 methd, 100/3.6= 27.7777 therefore 27!

Yup, the consensus is that the answer was 27 because the question was worded something like "How many times do the right feet land together in 100m" (italics mine), so it would round down. However, if the requirement was that 100m would be covered, then 112 steps would have been required and so they would have landed together 28 times.