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0 pointskeiferski15d ago0 comments

Some of these seem like questions that are expecting answers aligned with one ideological framing or another.

But I don’t actually know how All Souls selects for applicants – are there examples of people who argued against the prevailing opinions and still got accepted?

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pjc5015d ago

I'm from a Cambridge background, not Oxford, but the trick to this sort of essay is that the journey is the destination. That is, ultimately it's not expecting you to reach a single right conclusion, but to present evidence, argument, and references.

The rubric doesn't say, but I'm guessing you'd get three hours per essay, one hour per question, minus the minutes spent selecting which ones.

keiferskiOP15d ago

Of course, but I am wondering if you wrote a brilliant essay arguing for a viewpoint that seems to go against the one underlying the selection of questions here, would it matter?

My guess is no, it wouldn’t. These questions all have pretty strong assumptions behind them, and so my guess is that they’re looking for people who fundamentally have the same opinions but are capable of communicating them well. And not someone that has different opinions, even if they communicate them well.

wood_spirit15d ago

The examiners would delight in you entertaining them. It’s fine to argue anything, wilfully misinterpret the question or say outlandish things. All that matters is you give the examiner a window into your mind showing it to be clever and articulate and rounded?

roenxi15d ago

There isn't an "underlying selection of the questions" here, they're open ended, vague and look like they're chosen by a disconnected academic trying to be topical.

They're looking for a certain type of person, but we can't figure out who that is from the questions. We could probably do some cold reading just from knowing that it'll be a bunch of academics doing the assessing and they do tend to see the world in a certain way but there isn't anything to glean from the paper.

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MathMonkeyMan15d ago

I don't know, but many of them have a triggering smell, which must be on purpose. A polarizing prompt might show you what somebody thinks, but it is also likely to show you whether they think at all. I'm reminded of "This I Believe" on NPR. The subject is what a person believes, not what they don't believe.

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