1x 20 min interview
Economics and politics/philosophy problems, given beforehand
Timed practice papers
-
Read over personal statement. You're not expected to know everything.
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: 1
Skype interview: No
Length of interview: 20 minutes
I had only one interview for PPE that lasted about twenty minutes and was carried out by four professors. About an hour an a half before the interview, I was given some materials to look at.
The interview was roughly split into two parts. In the first half we covered the economics-related problem and in the second half the politics/philosophy problem. The first task was a problem solving exercise related to economics - it required no particular economics knowledge and only very basic mathematical skills. I was given a list of questions, along with about a page of information, beforehand, which I worked through and jotted down answers for. I took these into the interview, where we discussed the questions on the sheet. The second half of the interview was more focused on politics and philosophy, and we discussed the short article (about two or three pages) that I had been given.
The whole process was
I did the most recent practice papers under the same conditions as the test to get good experience of the timings.
In all honesty, I didn't do much preparation for my interview. I was advised that you couldn't prepare, and the people who told me that were
The interview totally went against what I was expecting. I imagined an intense debate where I would be challenged to robustly defend my arguments. In reality, the interview was based around a set of questions that aimed to show the interviewers my thought process. They're not expecting you to know everything - in fact they don't want you to know everything. They want to know how you think and reason.