The odd-sounding ones are real — and Oxford publishes each with the tutor’s own account of what it is for
Book a Free ConsultationYes and no. The famously odd questions are real — Oxford publishes them itself, for 25 subjects, with the interviewing tutor named. What the tabloid lists strip out is the paragraph underneath each one, in which the tutor explains what it is for. Read with that paragraph, a question about a cat’s eyes or a 30cm ruler stops being eccentric and becomes obvious.
A list of odd questions is entertainment; a worked answer is preparation. Our subject packs (£180 each) take questions of exactly this kind and set out the reasoning step by step, written by specialist subject tutors. Nine subjects have a free sample.
See the packs and free samples Or book a free consultationThe premise is half right, and the half that is wrong matters. Oxford maintains a sample interview questions page covering 25 subjects, from Asian and Middle Eastern Studies through to Theology and Religion. Its own framing is unambiguous: “These sample interview questions come direct from the tutors who conduct the interviews. We hope they’ll make you think, and help you understand why we ask the questions that we do.”
So the questions are not invented by the press, and Oxford is not embarrassed by them. What almost every round-up omits is the second half of each entry — several hundred words in which the tutor explains what the question is testing and how the conversation proceeds. The question is the part that travels; the explanation is the part that matters.
Below are eight questions Oxford publishes, with the tutor’s own account of the purpose beside each. Read the left column alone and it looks like a list of curiosities. Read across and the pattern is unmistakable.
| The question, as Oxford publishes it | Subject and interviewer | What the tutor says it is for |
|---|---|---|
| “Place a 30cm ruler on top of one finger from each hand... What happens when you bring your fingers together?” | Engineering — Steve Collins, University College | To “present candidates with an unfamiliar scenario and ask them to use what they know about familiar concepts (such as friction) to explain something” |
| “What shape does that middle rung trace out as the ladder falls to the floor?” | Mathematics — Rebecca Cotton-Barratt, Christ Church | “Whether you can do what mathematicians do, which is to abstract away all the unimportant information” |
| “What does it mean for someone to ‘take’ another’s car?” | Law — Ben McFarlane, Faculty of Law | “There is no right answer... Our focus is on the candidate’s reasoning” |
| “If I were to visit the area where you live, what would I be interested in?” | Geography — Lorraine Wild, St Hilda’s | To apply “geographical thinking” to everyday landscapes — and it “eliminates any advantage gained by those who are more widely travelled” |
| “If you could invent a new musical instrument, what kind of sound would it make?” | Music — Dan Grimley, Merton | “Answers which demonstrate a critical imagination at work”, and “by no means limited to classical music” |
| “Why do a cat’s eyes appear to ‘glow’ in the dark?” | Biomedical Sciences — Jan Schnupp, St Peter’s | Builds on school Biology and assesses “scientific curiosity (has the applicant ever wondered this themselves?)” |
| “In what ways do you think that writing for children is different to writing for adults?” | English Literature — Lucinda Rumsey, Mansfield | Answerable “even without knowing Rowling’s work at all”, from a candidate’s own experience as a reader |
| “Put these countries in order by their crude mortality: Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa, the UK.” | Medicine — Andrew King, Exeter | Approachable “without necessarily knowing anything about specific mortality rates around the world” |
A ninth is worth adding because it is the one most often quoted as proof that the whole thing is absurd. Martin Speight of St Anne’s asks Biology candidates: “Why do many animals have stripes?” Out of context it reads like a riddle. In context it is an invitation to reason about camouflage, signalling, thermoregulation and predator confusion — several competing explanations, none of them complete, which is exactly the sort of ground an interviewer wants a candidate standing on. Owen Lewis of Brasenose does the same with biodiversity, then follows a plausible theory with the question that does the real work: “how they would go about testing their idea. What sort of data would they need?”
Every one of those does the same job in a different costume: take something the candidate already knows and apply it to something they have not been asked about before. Friction applied to a ruler. A-level geography applied to your own street. School biology applied to a cat. The strangeness is not decoration, and it is not a test of nerve — it is the only reliable way to find a problem a candidate cannot have prepared an answer to.
If there is no right answer, there is nothing to memorise — which is precisely why rehearsal beats revision here. Our specialist tutors run mock interviews on questions of this shape and push back the way a tutor does, so the unfamiliarity stops being the hard part.
Book a Free Consultation Message us on WhatsAppOne entry deserves separating out, because it inverts the usual complaint about these questions.
The commonest criticism of Oxbridge interviews is that odd questions favour confident, well-resourced candidates who have seen the type before. Oxford’s Geography question was built to do the opposite. Lorraine Wild of St Hilda’s asks: “If I were to visit the area where you live, what would I be interested in?” Her explanation ends with this: “By asking specifically about their home area the question eliminates any advantage gained by those who are more widely travelled.”
A candidate who has been to forty countries has no edge on a candidate who has been to none, because the subject of the question is the second candidate’s own street. That is a deliberate piece of design, published openly, and it is almost never mentioned in the coverage of how strange these interviews are.
The English question works similarly. Lucinda Rumsey of Mansfield asks about writing for children versus adults, prompted by JK Rowling — and notes that “even without knowing Rowling’s work at all” a candidate can answer from their own experience of reading. The reference is a way in, not a gate.
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Two tutors say this outright, in different subjects, and it is the single most useful thing on the whole page.
Ben McFarlane, on the Law question: “There is no right answer to this question. For example, can you take a car without driving it, or even without moving it? Our focus is on the candidate’s reasoning — how he or she formulates an initial definition, and how he or she then applies and refines that initial definition in response to hypothetical examples provided by the interviewers.” He gives one such example: sheltering in an unlocked car for fifteen minutes during a shower. Have you taken it?
Kathryn Scott, on the Biochemistry question: “getting the correct answer isn’t important here.”
Put those together and the shape of the exercise changes. The interviewer is not withholding an answer for you to guess. They are watching you build a position, then handing you a case that strains it, to see whether you revise or defend. What Oxbridge interviewers actually mark covers the criteria behind that; how to think out loud covers doing it audibly.
A practical test, because the internet is full of these and they are not equally sound.
| Where a “weird question” list came from | Can you rely on it? |
|---|---|
| Oxford’s own sample questions page, 25 subjects, tutor named and purpose given | Yes — published by the university |
| A tutor or college quoted by name with their own commentary | Yes — attributable and checkable |
| “Real questions” recalled by recent candidates | No — every candidate agreed not to share interview content in any form |
| A news or entertainment round-up of “insane” questions | No — no source and no purpose attached to any question |
The third row is the one people miss. Accepting an Oxford interview invitation means agreeing “not to share in any form the content of interviews with others”, and Oxford spells out that this “includes discussing the content of interviews verbally”. A page advertising the real questions from last December is therefore relying on somebody having broken that undertaking — or, far more often, on invention.
None of which makes those lists dangerous, exactly. It makes them useless: a question with no commentary tells you nothing about what a good answer does.
The honest answer is that you cannot prepare for the question, and you can prepare completely for the move it asks you to make.
Every published example rewards the same three steps. Name what you already know that might apply — friction, transport proteins, the difference between an audience of children and one of adults. Build a position out loud, so the interviewer can follow it. Expect the case that strains it, because the follow-up is where the discrimination happens, and answer it by revising rather than defending.
Oxford also describes what happens if you dry up: the tutor prompts, widening the question rather than supplying the answer. Being stuck is designed into the format. Around 10,000 of roughly 23,000 Oxford applicants are interviewed each year, and every one of them gets stuck somewhere; what varies is whether the interviewer can hear what happens next.
Oxford interviews online in December 2026, and Cambridge’s main period runs 7–18 December 2026. If you want practice on questions of this shape, how to run a mock interview at home sets out the method, and our Oxbridge interview questions hub carries Oxford’s published questions by subject alongside our own packs with the reasoning written out.
Start with a free sample in your subject — real questions with the reasoning written out, so you can see what a strong answer does rather than only what it concludes. The full subject packs are £180 each and are written by specialist subject tutors.
Browse the subject packs Or book a free consultationThey sound odd in a list and make ordinary sense with their purpose attached. Oxford publishes sample questions for 25 subjects, each with the interviewing tutor named, and says they “come direct from the tutors who conduct the interviews” and are meant to “help you understand why we ask the questions that we do”. “Why do a cat’s eyes glow in the dark?” is a strange thing to be asked at an interview and a perfectly sensible way to test school biology on an unfamiliar case.
Among the ones Oxford publishes itself, the Engineering question is the most physically odd: “Place a 30cm ruler on top of one finger from each hand... What happens when you bring your fingers together?” Steve Collins of University College explains that it would never open an interview, and that it comes later, when tutors “present candidates with an unfamiliar scenario and ask them to use what they know about familiar concepts (such as friction) to explain something.”
Often not, and two Oxford tutors say so explicitly. Ben McFarlane, on the Law question about taking a car: “There is no right answer to this question... Our focus is on the candidate’s reasoning.” Kathryn Scott, on the Biochemistry question: “getting the correct answer isn’t important here.” What is assessed is how you build and revise an explanation, not whether you land on a particular conclusion.
At least one is designed to do the opposite. Oxford’s Geography question — “If I were to visit the area where you live, what would I be interested in?” — is explained by Lorraine Wild of St Hilda’s: “By asking specifically about their home area the question eliminates any advantage gained by those who are more widely travelled.” A question that sounds like small talk is doing equity work.
Be careful. Accepting an Oxford interview invitation means agreeing “not to share in any form the content of interviews with others”, verbally included. So a list presented as this year’s genuine questions is either old, invented, or somebody breaking that undertaking. Oxford’s own published set, with each tutor named and each purpose explained, is more useful anyway, because a remembered question carries no commentary.
By practising the move rather than the content. Every published example rewards the same thing: taking familiar material and applying it to something unfamiliar, out loud. Oxford also describes prompting a candidate who stalls, so being stuck is part of the design rather than the end of it. The preparation is repeated exposure to unfamiliar problems in your subject, with someone asking the follow-up.
Some do. Helen Swift of St Hilda’s says of the Modern Languages question — “What makes a novel or play ‘political’?” — that it “is the sort of question that could emerge from a student’s personal statement”, and that a tutor might “start off by discussing the specific work that they cite”. Anything you have claimed to have read or enjoyed is legitimately available for questioning, which is worth remembering before you write it.
By making them predictable in shape if not in content. Our specialist tutors run mock interviews built on published questions, prompting when a candidate stalls the way Oxford describes, and following a first answer with the question that tests it. Our subject packs are £180 each and set the reasoning out as transcripts rather than model essays; nine subjects have a free sample, and 91% of our students achieve their desired grades.
Free samples in nine subjects show you the format, the full expert packs are £180 each with worked reasoning rather than model answers, and 1-to-1 mock interviews put them under real conditions.
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