University of Oxford
Oxford's standard-entry Medicine course (A100) is a six-year programme with a traditional structure: three pre-clinical years grounded in the medical sciences, leading to a BA, followed by three clinical years. Teaching combines lectures and practicals with the college tutorial system, where students meet a tutor in very small groups to discuss work, defend reasoning and be questioned closely. Shortlisting for interview uses academic record and the UCAT; shortlisted applicants are interviewed by more than one college.
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The interview
Interviews are held online in December. Shortlisted applicants are typically interviewed at two colleges — their preferred (or allocated) college and a second one — with a mix of academic interviewers and at least one practising clinician involved across the process. Each interview resembles a short tutorial: a scientific problem, a graph or data, an unfamiliar scenario, or an ethical question explored in depth with follow-up questions. Interviewers are not looking for memorised knowledge but for how you reason with new information.
What they look for
- Ability to reason logically from first principles about unfamiliar problems.
- Responsiveness to new information and hints — changing your mind well.
- Genuine intellectual curiosity about the science underlying medicine.
- Clear communication of your thinking as you go.
- Realistic understanding of medicine and the qualities it needs.
Typical question themes
- Physiology 'why' questions (e.g. why organs are the shape or size they are)
- Interpreting graphs and experimental data
- Designing an experiment or spotting confounders
- Estimation and quantitative reasoning
- Ethical reasoning explored in depth
- Motivation and insight into a medical career
Values you'll see
- Academic rigour and independent thinking
- Learning through dialogue (the tutorial system)
- Scientific enquiry as the basis of clinical practice
How to prepare
- Practise explaining scientific concepts aloud to someone else, step by step.
- Work through unfamiliar problems where you don't know the answer, and narrate your reasoning.
- Read beyond the syllabus in areas that genuinely interest you — expect to be questioned on them.
- Get comfortable with being challenged: treat hints as collaboration, not criticism.
- Test your online setup (camera, sound, a quiet room, pen and paper nearby).
Practise for University of Oxford
- Roughly how many times will your heart beat in your lifetime?
- We can live perfectly well with one kidney. So why do we have two?
- Why are most cells so small? Can you think of any exceptions, and how do they cope?
- Is a virus alive?
- Why do people become breathless when they climb a high mountain? How does the body adapt if they stay there?
- Elephants have far more cells than humans, yet they don't seem to get cancer more often. Why might that be surprising, and how might you explain it?