English Literature Admissions Test; 2x interviews
Interview 1: Analysis of unseen poetry; Interview 2: Questions on personal statement
Practised speaking out loud to someone else about literature
Completed practise papers online
There’s nothing to lose by applying and giving it a go!
Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.
Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.
Test taken:
Number of interviews: 2
Time between interviews: 3 hours
Length of interviews: 20 minutes
Online interview: No
I had 2 interviews, for the first I was given an hour to choose 1 unseen poem from a collection of 3, annotate it and then I discussed it with 2 interviewers for 20 minutes.
The second was really anchored to my personal statement. I got asked questions mostly on the texts that I mentioned directly but I was also asked to bring a long list of books I’d read in the past year and was asked some questions on those. There weren’t any of the silly scary out-of-context questions that you see online and there was a good amount of opportunity in both interviews for me to direct the conversation towards things that interested me. I was surprised at how much more relaxing the set-up was and how kind the
I made mind maps about all the books I mentioned in my personal statement making sure I knew the plot thoroughly and the context surrounding the texts and jotting down anything I found particularly interesting about them and any ideas they sparked. It also really helped to familiarise myself with some critical fields.
I made some mind-map notes on Marxism, aestheticism, feminism, critical race studies, historicism etc. so that I could read texts through different lenses whilst engaging with other scholarship (don’t worry though if you’ve not come across critical fields before, this was all fairly new territory for me but just googling the basics and making some notes on a couple I thought sounded particularly interesting was really helpful in how I approached texts!).
Also just practicing speaking out loud to someone else about literature was helpful whether that was to a friend, teacher or relative. It’s just good to practice thinking out loud about literature whenever you can (even if it might be a little irritating to people who have no interest in the subject haha).
Practice papers- they’re available online! Also just looking at as many unseen poetry and prose extracts as you can and really working on your close analysis skills.
Go forward seeing this as an amazing opportunity to stretch yourself and discuss your subject with world-leading experts. There’s really nothing to lose by applying and giving it a go!