Admissions interviews at Oxford can seem a bit mysterious and stressful. In reality, they can be quite an enjoyable experience (even if a bit stressful) for students who like thinking and talking about mathematics and computer science. Most of my students have said they enjoyed (at least some aspects of) the interviews. There are also many good sources of information available to learn more about interviews, and I will link to some of these below.

On this blog, together with some colleagues, I intend to post some interview questions that we actually used over the last few years. Two of these will be posted on June 29 for the university-wide open days. A couple of weeks later I will write a post with solutions to those two questions, as well as a description of how a typical interview based on that question might have been. Over the next few months leading up to December 2022, we will post at least two additional past interview questions, and with some delay, solutions to them and a discussion of how they might have been used in interviews.

It is very common to not arrive at the complete solution in an interview. For some questions, a 25 minute interview isn't really sufficient to fully solve the question. Often, we will switch from one question to a different one because we want to see how students think about different types of mathematical problems. So in short, we would almost never expect a fully worked out solution–like the one we will post–to be arrived at in an interview. Getting through a significant part of the question will already likely earn the student an Oxford place.

After the solutions have been posted, if you have a different way of solving the problem, I'd be very happy to hear from you, so please do send me an email.

Some links to resources regarding Oxford Maths/CS interviews

This list will be updated as I become aware of more resources. Suggestions by email welcome, though I may not add all of them.