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The answer guides to these Oxbridge questions have been put together by medics who have successfully navigated interviews at top Medical Schools. They’re included in our Mastering the Medical School Interview Guide which you’ll get when you join a Medical School Interview Course. It’s over 220 pages long and has everything you need to ace your interview.
Your Oxbridge interview won’t spend too much time asking you the questions that most other Medical Schools focus on (for example, ‘Why Oxford/Cambridge?’ or ‘Why Medicine?’).
Instead, they’re interested in how you think and how you approach problems – and also how you cope with not knowing the answer immediately. Focus on logical thinking, justifying your thoughts and adapting your ideas based on the discussion.
It’s worth being aware that the Oxford and Cambridge medical courses have a heavy focus on research and an overall aim to produce academic Doctors. For that reason, they want people who are interested in learning about science beyond the minimal requirements required to be a Doctor.
The best advice for an Oxbridge Medicine interview is to talk aloud – even if you feel like it seems stupid, say it! Never answer “I don’t know”, because it completely shuts down discussion and gives the impression that you can’t tackle a problem on the spot.
The interview is also a chance for the admissions tutors interviewing you to see how you would cope with the Oxbridge tutorial system. They are looking for people who will engage with and add to group discussions.
This is quite a standard Medical School question, so it’s one to prepare for any Medical School interview. The GMC’s ‘Good Medical Practice’ guidelines are a useful guide to read.
Say anything that is sensible and justifiable. For example, you may suggest that a good Doctor should keep up-to-date with new research. This is because of the impact it may have on disease management in the future, as well as in day-to-day practice by helping to manage patients’ expectations about what they have heard in the news pertaining to their own illness.
Here is your opportunity to show that you have really prepared for your Oxbridge Medicine interview.
You don’t need to know a huge amount of detail about your topic of choice. You just need to have read something interesting that you would be happy to discuss – this could be a research paper or a news article. If you mentioned something specific in your Personal Statement, make sure you revisit it and are able to discuss it.
For example, you may have an interest in Alzheimer’s disease. A little bit of reading will tell you that there are lots of new drugs being tested on animals that have shown some effect in improving memory. This might start a discussion on how one can model a disease like Alzheimer’s in animals, or how good animals are as a model of human disease.
This kind of question is common in an Oxbridge Medicine interview, because you should have some understanding from A-Level Biology.
Approaching these questions is simple. First, state what you see. Is there a specific pattern (e.g. only boys or girls affected)? Look at common inheritance patterns – you should be familiar with AD and AR inheritance.
Have a brief look at X-linked inheritance as this may be a new concept – but you really don’t have to understand it to do well on a question like this. All you need to do is talk aloud, show your thinking and be logical.
This is picking up on something that you may already have some idea about from GCSE/A-Level. If a scientific concept like this is brought up in an Oxbridge Medicine interview, interviewers might ask if you have learnt about it at school (since different syllabuses cover slightly different topics).
Start by explaining what vaccines are and how they work, as clearly and concisely as you can. The interviewers may then delve deeper into the subject and explore other ideas.
For example, some students are given a graph showing a number of individuals vaccinated on the X axis and incidence of disease on the Y axis, and are then asked to discuss it. The graph may show that not everybody needed to be vaccinated to result in zero cases of the disease. This could then result in a discussion of herd immunity and its importance, as well as considering who couldn’t be vaccinated (e.g. newborn babies).
The interviewers don’t mind that candidates will struggle with this kind of question in an Oxbridge Medicine interview. They want to discover the way you tackle questions that you don’t know the answer to.
The best thing to do is to talk aloud about what you do know, and they will then guide you towards the answer.
To answer this question, you only need to use equations you will know from A-Level science: mass = density x volume and moles = mass/Mr. By inserting numbers you should already know (density = 1kg/m3, Mr H20=18), you can work out molar concentration= ~55.
Ethical questions are common features of Medical School interviews and Oxbridge is no exception.
The approach to any ethical question is the same: show that you understand both sides. Usually, it will be ok to detail both sides and leave it there – but if pushed to choose a side, you can settle on either side as long as you justify yourself (for example, which factors are more important and why).
In this question about boxing, you could explore a number of avenues. One idea may be to discuss the following: There is good evidence that boxing causes long-term brain damage. This is on a spectrum, but at the worst end, it may result in the possibility of severe physical and mental handicap, perhaps requiring specialist hospital input and long-term residential care. Should the taxpayer have to pay for this? Boxing isn’t a job for most people (unless you are a professional boxer). It is a hobby, so could easily be avoided.
You could also discuss that many people choose other sports as a hobby, and will often suffer injuries from them. These injuries may be less severe and require less money to treat, but are overwhelmingly common (for example, ACL damage in football/rugby). Does this mean that any sports-related injury should have to be paid for by the individual? If so, this could mean that people are less likely to play sport and would become less active as a result, potentially impacting on NHS expenditure in the future.
This is just one avenue of thought – you could pick any idea and explore it further. The best approach is to discuss both sides of the argument and possible wider implications. Interviewers will latch on to what you say and guide you down an avenue of discussion.
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