There was a curious atmosphere the other week in Oxford. Big kids everywhere, loping around like students yet somehow not like students. Too tidy, bewildered and lacking the swagger of ownership. I knew why. We had dropped off two of ours - disposed on either side of the A-level hurdle - and the papers were reporting that Euan Blair was being grilled at Trinity. It was the first week of entrance interviews, a process which Oxford spins out to an epic scale, often keeping the poor little toads prisoner for three whole days. The young I know with Cambridge interviews report that the whole thing is over inside a day, with two brisk colloquies, a bit of scribbling, and a train journey home in which your head hums with esprit d’escalier.
The very few other faculties across the country which routinely interview (instead of vaguely pulling forms out of a hat) seem to act with similar dispatch. But Oxford colleges prefer a more measured pace, and display reckless generosity with the board and lodging. One candidate who missed a place last year philosophically observed, “I feel honoured that they thought me worth the amount I ate.”
He is not alone. Talking to interview candidates of the past couple of years - including those who didn’t make it - I have quite often picked up a surprising note of gratitude. Their headteachers remain curmudgeonly - I notice that independent heads have now jumped on the bandwagon of grumbling about how frightening the interviews are to their little darlings, accusing dons of being tough and unsympathetic and “keeping candidates waiting for whole days”.
But the kids sometimes give you a different story. Yes, it was terrifying; yes, you had to hang around between summonses, checking the noticeboard every half hour and sleeping uneasily in a college cell. Yes, the dons were an alien species, quite different from helpful schoolteachers, probing, restless, and obviously bored when you waffled. “But they’re meant to be, aren’t they?” said one girl. “You don’t go to a famous university to get your ego boosted. You go to see whether you can make it, and to meet whizzy dons.”
The result of the probing and the challenging, of course, is that you get flustered and occasionally make a tit of yourself. I speak as the proud parent of a historian who is currently dining out on the embarrassment of having managed to forget who Winston Churchill was. But what the hell; given the equally hideous tales from the waiting room, any candidate with half a brain can work out that dons are used to pratfalls and might make allowances. Possibly. The sense of quixotic gratitude is not only only for the food, but for “being at least given a chance” and for “being looked at properly”. Let headteachers and wimps emote about the misery of being kept waiting all day: wise kids say “Hmm. Perhaps that means they’re really thinking about giving me another chance, even if I did say Garibaldi was a biscuit”. There is also gratitude for the glimpse of how real university minds work.
The common misconception of the Laura Spence-obsessed classes is that an interview consists of tricksy personal questions about your motivation. This might have been so when they had a full entrance exam to judge on. But since political correctness closed down the exam as too hard for the badly-taught, many colleges conduct interviews as tutorials. This is not some formulaic personnel assessment, but a process where real teachers, at the top of the tree, look for people they will enjoy teaching. So there you are, an unassuming sixth-former, plucked from the humdrum grind of A-levels to sit like Jesus in the temple discussing Edward the Second with a phalanx of distinguished historians, or discovering what goes through the mind of a topflight critic reading a metaphysical poet. And - through the terror and the self-doubt - an embryo scholar finds this exciting. “I wanted to take NOTES” grumbled one. “If Dr X had just gone on two minutes longer she’d practically have written my personal study coursework.” “I got some good ideas to flash at my next work experience interviewer” said a lawyer.
The robustness and humility of such responses might cheer up the ever-criticised interviewers. Maybe it should also make other top universities think twice about dismissing the practice as too much trouble or too expensive. Because - given the cavalier way that applications are otherwise handled , and the probable unreliability of the first few years of A2 examiners’ judgment - interviewing is not only fairer , but might get you better students. And how did mine do? No idea yet. But even if neither makes it, I echo the gratitude. Universities which interview should get brownie points, not political contumely, for being willing to look at people and not just tick-boxes.
