People often ask me whether I have advice about applying to Oxford for PPE. One thing I would recommend doing first is working out whether you actually want to study the subject.
Assuming you’ve passed that stage, here are the tips I usually give – they’re not especially original, but I think hopefully more accurate than the generic copy about the TSA written on sites trying to sell you tutoring or suchlike.
Personal statements
First, a caveat that these don’t matter very much for Oxford: they are given “low” weight in making admissions decisions. I wouldn’t push this to the limit and submit nothing, but I think you hit diminishing returns quite quickly. If you’re at the stage of trying to fit in clever puns or circular narratives to your personal statement, move on and do something fun.
- Don’t use words that you don’t know the precise meanings of.
- Synonyms do not have exactly the same connotations or applications as each other, regardless of what your thesaurus might say.
- Admissions tutors don’t care about how wide your vocabulary is, but they do care about being able to understand the content you’re trying to convey
- Try to demonstrate that you have actually engaged with thinkers’ arguments rather than merely read books / taken courses
- Contrasting or otherwise linking ideas with each other in non-obvious ways is a good way to do this. Read my personal statement if you’re interested, though note that it was written when the personal statement took the form of a single piece of writing, rather than a series responses to shorter questions, as now proposed by UCAS.
TSA (Thinking Skills Assessment)
- In general, the main thing to do is practise a lot.
- My score improved by about 20 points from the first test I did to the actual exam.
- Familiarity with the kinds of questions the test has and how quickly you need to work (my mistakes early on tended to be silly errors from rushing faster than was necessary, and not having the energy or motivation to check properly) make it much easier to do well.
Critical thinking
- Try to identify the premisses, intermediate conclusions, and final conclusions in the arguments.
- Of course, this is easier said than done.
- Sometimes, the language will give away the final conclusion: “this means”, “as a result”, and “therefore” can be useful (though not infallible) clues.
- Another way I thought about it was to ask myself “what is the author trying to persuade me of?” the author is trying to persuade the reader of, and what sentences are merely in support of that overall message.
- Make abstractions about the structure of arguments.
- For example, an argument might be of the (invalid) form “X means Y. Not-X, so not-Y.”
- When in words, it is less immediately evident that the argument is invalid, or what structurally similar arguments might be.
- Once you strip out the specific terminology and context of the argument, it’s much quicker to get to your answer.
- When you have to suggest the assumption being made, it’s helpful to come at it with an adversarial mindset of “How do I break this argument?”.
- If you can interpret the argument in a way that makes the conclusion false whilst all the premisses are true, then that means you’ve twisted one of the assumptions away from what the author had in mind
- Introspecting around the details of the interpretation you’ve found should help you to home in on what exactly that assumption was.
- You might find the section on arguments in the Logic Manual somewhat useful as a way of reframing these sorts of questions. It’s the textbook used for learning logic in PPE, so don’t worry about all the details, and you may not find it adds anything new.
Problem solving
- You will probably have noticed from past papers that there are only a few distinct types of question (e.g., spatial reasoning, finding the relevant data, interpreting/matching up graphs, calendars, algebra problems).
- The main thing I found helpful beyond knowing that (and how you go about answering each kind of question) was realising that each type also has a few, predictable and repeated traps.
- Quickly going through a mental checklist of those traps after I answered each question was quite a useful way of bringing down the number of silly mistakes I ended up making.
Essay
- Take a look at specimen papers to get a sense of the kinds of questions which come up.
- There are enough questions over a broad enough range of topics (four) to choose from that it’s entirely possible to have an answer to one of them in mind from the minute you open the paper.
- If you spend a lot of time interested in and reading about PPE-related questions then you will likely have formed views (and considered arguments) about at least one of the questions already. So choose that one!
- Practise writing timed and with a page/word limit, so that you get used to running out of time and space at the same point (adjust how long you spend planning to achieve this).
Interviews
- It’s cliché, but really do think out loud and be explicit about your reasoning.
- Define terms at the start of your answer and don’t be afraid to ask for clarification if there’s a technical term you don’t understand; it’s much better to ask and be told than guess and fumble your way through.
- Be receptive to adjusting or refining your previous answers if the interviewer suggests you should consider further ideas/information
- Some things I don’t think it’s worth preparing responses for:
- “Why X subject?”
- Everyone who has been given an interview will have a reasonably OK, fluff answer to this question, and asking it would give the admissions tutors virtually zero information they don’t already have.
- It’s not impossible that they’d ask it, I just don’t think this is a question worth spending time thinking about. You probably have perfectly good cached answers from writing your personal statement anyway.
- “Why X college?”
- Almost certain they wouldn’t ask you this, given that you can submit an open application, or be pooled.
- It would also be surprising if they asked you “Why Oxford?”.
- “Why X subject?”
- Emphasis on personal statements varies from college to college.
- Merton (my college) doesn’t ask anybody about theirs; friends elsewhere (and at some Cambridge colleges) spent ages talking about theirs.
- If you can find a current student at the college you’re applying for and ask them what their interviews were like, that is helpful intelligence, but I doubt it would make a decisive difference to how well your interview goes, so don’t worry if not.
- In general Oxbridge interviews are extremely subject-focussed, and typically wouldn’t even mention extracurricular activities, unlike (my impression of) US college-style interviews.