Oxford’s Economics and Management interviews begin in the last week of the Dubai school term and end in the winter break. For a CBSE student, the syllabus stops one market short of monopoly.
Oxford interviews Economics and Management candidates first on Wednesday 9, Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December 2026, the last three weekdays of term before Dubai’s private schools break up. It tells them by 10am UK time on Monday 14 December, which is 14:00 in the UAE and the first day of the winter break, whether a second college wants them on the 15th or 16th. Cambridge Economics interviews fall between 7 and 18 December, on dates each College sets.
The country-wide picture, including both school calendars, the Colleges that fly overseas applicants in and visas, is on our guide to Oxbridge interviews from Dubai and the UAE. This page takes one pair of courses, Oxford Economics and Management and Cambridge Economics, and adds the curriculum question that matters most for Economics in Dubai: what the CBSE syllabus has taught before December, and where it stops.
Dates on this page are for 2027 entry, checked at source in September 2026. School dates are KHDA’s and govern Dubai’s private schools; a school in Abu Dhabi or another emirate sets its own calendar, so check it. Oxford gives every timetable time in UK time (GMT), four hours behind the UAE in December.
Oxford publishes a timetable row for each course, and the row for Economics and Management (E&M) is one of the tightest. It reads: “First college interviews will take place on Wednesday 9, Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December.” It goes on: “Decisions regarding second college interviews will be communicated to applicants by 10am on Monday 14 December”, and “Second college interviews will take place on Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 December.” Every interview is online, and Oxford states that “where times are given in this timetable, they are given as UK time (GMT).”
KHDA requires every private school in Dubai to keep the government calendar’s term dates and breaks, and its 2026–27 table for schools whose year starts in September marks Monday 14 December as the “Start of winter break – All schools”. Its table for April-start schools gives the same day. So a Dubai applicant for E&M meets a first college in the final three weekdays of term, hears about a second college on the first day of the holiday, and, if called, is interviewed again on the second and third days of it.
| December 2026 | Oxford E&M row | Dubai private schools (KHDA) | On a UAE clock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 7 – Tue 8 | No E&M interviews in the row | Term | Cambridge’s interview period opens on the 7th |
| Wed 9 – Fri 11 | First college interviews | Last three weekdays of term | Times set in UK time; the UAE is four hours ahead |
| Mon 14 | Second-college decisions by 10am UK | First day of the winter break | 10am GMT is 14:00 in the UAE |
| Tue 15 – Wed 16 | Second college interviews | Winter break | Times set in UK time |
| Thu 17 – Fri 18 | Nothing further in the row | Winter break | Cambridge’s interview period ends on the 18th |
Source: University of Oxford interview timetable, Economics and Management row; KHDA academic calendar for Dubai private schools, 2026–27; University of Cambridge interviews page. UAE clock from the IANA time zone database (Asia/Dubai, UTC+4, no daylight saving).
The Monday is the day to plan around. By 14:00 in Dubai a family knows whether the next two days are taken, so the first three days of the holiday are the ones not to fill with flights until that message has arrived. Oxford also warns that “candidates may be asked to attend interviews outside of the timeframes given in this timetable”, and it says you should be given at least 24 hours’ notice of any additional interview. It also states that “the extensive logistics involved mean it is not possible to rearrange the time of interviews”, and its interview pages offer no way to declare a clash. Our page on second college interviews at Oxford explains what a callback does and does not mean.
The first-interview days raise a smaller question, because they are school days. Oxford’s checklist asks candidates, as soon as the invitation arrives, to “talk to your school or college and agree where your online interview should take place.” For a Dubai student interviewed on the 9th, 10th or 11th, that means a quiet room at school in the final week of term; by the second-college days the school has closed.
Only for students at schools that follow the UAE Ministry of Education curriculum. The Ministry’s 2026/27 calendar is headed “For public and private schools following the UAE Ministry of Education curriculum”, and KHDA binds Dubai’s private schools to the government calendar’s term dates and breaks, not to the Ministry’s exam weeks. For a British, IB, American or Indian-curriculum student, 9 to 11 December is ordinary term time.
For a Ministry-curriculum student it is not. The Ministry marks 7–11 December as “Continuation of End-of-Term Exams”, so the three E&M first-interview days are three of the five days in that block. The Ministry’s assessment policy tells students to sit the main period “as the make-up exam will include questions of higher difficulty levels compared to the exams given during the main period”, and its calendar puts the Term 1 make-ups on 14–18 December, inside the winter break. Oxford will not move the interview. Cambridge, by contrast, lists exams among the reasons it accepts in question 8.2 of its application, so the same student can declare the dates there. Our guide to December interview clashes for overseas applicants sets out how each university treats a clash.
One fact narrows the group further. Oxford marks the UAE Tawjihiyya “Not accepted”, and Cambridge says applicants with the Tawjihiyya alone “will not be competitive and are unlikely to be successful”. A Ministry-curriculum student who reaches an E&M interview has therefore added other qualifications, and that student is the only one for whom the exam block and the interview days overlap.
The Economics II pack — £180
Ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, each with prompts and a worked answer, moving from demerit-good policy and oil-price shocks to circle-chord combinatorics and the case for printing money under stagflation. There is no free Economics sample; our nine free samples cover other subjects.
Get the Economics II pack — £180Indian-curriculum schools teach 99,603 of the 387,441 pupils in Dubai’s private schools, about a quarter, according to KHDA’s 2024–25 landscape, which makes the Indian curriculum the second largest in the emirate after the UK curriculum. Those are pupils from nursery upwards, not Oxbridge applicants, and KHDA does not separate CBSE from the other Indian boards.
CBSE puts all of its microeconomics in Class XI, a year before the interview, and fills Class XII Economics with macroeconomics and Indian Economic Development. The Class XI syllabus for 2025–26, the year most 2027 applicants took Class XI, is unchanged in the 2026–27 edition and lists four microeconomics units worth 40 marks: an introduction, consumer’s equilibrium and demand, producer behaviour and supply, and “Forms of Market and Price Determination under perfect competition with simple applications”. The last unit’s text ends: “Perfect competition - Features; Determination of market equilibrium and effects of shifts in demand and supply. (Short Run Only)”.
That list is the whole of CBSE microeconomics, and it contains one market. Monopoly, oligopoly and any contest between a few sellers are not on it, and the absence is read from the unit list itself.
What the syllabus does teach matters as much. Unit 6 covers revenue and cost, including “Producer’s Equilibrium - meaning and its conditions in terms of Marginal Revenue-Marginal Cost”, with costs taught for the short run. Unit 5 teaches “the consumer’s budget (budget set and budget line)”. The statistics half of Class XI teaches correlation by Karl Pearson’s method and Spearman’s rank. CBSE Class XII Mathematics adds Bayes’ theorem and linear programming, with its “constraints, objective function, optimization”. A CBSE student therefore arrives with most of the tools an interviewer uses. What is missing is any market in which a firm sets its own price.
Our Economics I pack card lists four topics: “Consumer budget constraints, monopoly cost curves, an ice-cream-van location game, and Bayes’ theorem on a faulty aircraft wing.” Set against the syllabus, a CBSE student has met two of them and not the other two.
| Topic on the Economics I card | Where the CBSE syllabus stands |
|---|---|
| Consumer budget constraints | Taught: Class XI Economics, Unit 5, the budget set and budget line |
| Monopoly cost curves | Not taught as monopoly: the market unit stops at perfect competition in the short run, though Unit 6 teaches marginal revenue, marginal cost and short-run costs |
| An ice-cream-van location game | Not taught: no unit covers sellers who respond to one another |
| Bayes’ theorem on a faulty aircraft wing | Taught: Class XII Mathematics, Unit VI |
Source: CBSE Senior Secondary Curriculum, Economics (2025–26 and 2026–27 editions) and Mathematics (2026–27); the Economics I card on our question hub.
Oxford keeps this in proportion. Its Economics and Management course page says the interview “is not primarily a test of existing knowledge and, in particular, is not a test of any economics or management studied previously.” A missing unit is not a missing mark. It is a reason to practise reasoning about a price-setting firm before December, so that the first attempt does not happen in front of an interviewer.
For a student on A-levels, Pearson Edexcel International A-levels or Cambridge International, the position is different. Our research found no maths gap that bears on Economics on those routes, and we have not compared their economics syllabuses with the UK ones, so this page makes no curriculum claim for them either way. Check which board and which route your school enters you for before assuming anything.
Start from what Unit 6 already gave you. You know that a producer is in equilibrium where marginal revenue equals marginal cost, and you know how average and marginal revenue relate. Under perfect competition the firm takes the price as given, so every extra unit sells at that price. Now give the firm the whole market’s demand curve instead. To sell one more unit it must lower the price on every unit it sells, so marginal revenue falls below price. Find the output where the new marginal revenue meets marginal cost, read the price off the demand curve above it, and compare both with the competitive result. Less output, a higher price and a gap between price and marginal cost: that comparison is the core of a monopoly question, and it is built from tools you were examined on in Class XI.
Then change the question the way an interviewer would. What if a second firm could enter, or the firm could charge different customers different prices? What if two sellers must each choose where to stand on a street, knowing the other will respond? The last is a location game, and it is where the CBSE list gives you least, because no unit deals with sellers who react to one another. Work it with a line, two points and one question, “where would I move if I were the other seller?”, and say each step aloud.
Two CBSE strengths are worth using on purpose. Linear programming has already trained you to write an objective and its constraints, which is the shape of a consumer choosing a bundle on a budget line. Bayes’ theorem is the tool behind any question that asks how a judgement should change when new evidence arrives. Oxford’s own published E&M sample question, set by Brian Bell of Lady Margaret Hall, starts somewhere else entirely: “Do bankers deserve the pay they receive?” Oxford’s commentary rewards the candidate who asks why seemingly equivalently talented people can be paid so much more in banking than in other occupations. The skill is the same in each case: turning a tool you know on a question you have not seen.
The Economics I pack — £180
Ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, each with prompts and a worked answer: consumer budget constraints, monopoly cost curves, an ice-cream-van location game, and Bayes’ theorem on a faulty aircraft wing. Two of the four sit on ground the CBSE syllabus covers and two go past it. We publish 30 packs across 17 subjects at £180 each; there is no free Economics sample, and our nine free samples cover other subjects.
Get the Economics I pack — £180To Oxford, yes. Oxford lists CBSE Year XII as an accepted qualification, and Economics and Management asks, in A-level terms, for “AAA (with Maths at A or A*)”. Read the CBSE grades Oxford asks for on its own international qualifications page; this page does not state them.
To Cambridge, not on Class XII alone. Cambridge’s India guidance, updated in March 2026, lists the courses for which some Colleges accept CBSE Class XII. There are 23 of them, and Economics is not one; the only course on the list with Economics in its name is Environment, Law, and Economics, which is a different degree. For a course off the list, Cambridge says you are “strongly recommended to undertake further study”, and gives examples: A Levels, the International Baccalaureate, or “5 or more Advanced Placement (AP) Tests at Score 5, plus Grades A1 A1 A1 A1 A1 in relevant Class XII subjects”. The rule sits under India, and it applies to a CBSE student in Dubai because the qualification is the same. The full entry is on Cambridge’s international entry requirements page.
Each course also sets its own test. Oxford Economics and Management requires the TARA, and an applicant who applies to no other TARA course does not need to complete its Writing Task module. Cambridge requires every Economics applicant to sit the TMUA, and asks for Mathematics at A level or its equivalent at every College. Both results reach candidates on 16 November 2026. Our pages on the weeks after the TARA for Oxford Economics and Management and the weeks after the TMUA for Cambridge Economics cover the stretch between test and interview.
Economics is taught at every Cambridge College except Newnham, and no College in Cambridge’s 2027-entry format table names Economics as an exception, so each College’s general rule applies. For an applicant based outside the UK, Churchill, Emmanuel, King’s and Selwyn interview in person in Cambridge; Pembroke and Trinity let you choose between online and in person; the rest interview overseas applicants online. The detail on each in-person College, including King’s form deadline and the visa routes, is on our UAE guide, and our guide to Oxbridge interviews from overseas covers what applies in every country.
One College is a double commitment for an economist. Cambridge’s Economics page marks six Colleges as also requiring Further Maths: Christ’s, Churchill, Corpus Christi, Magdalene, St John’s and Sidney Sussex. Read against the format table, which is our cross-reference rather than a sentence Cambridge prints, Churchill is the only one of the six that interviews an overseas applicant in person; the other five interview overseas applicants online. For a Dubai applicant, Churchill means Further Maths on the record and a flight to Cambridge in December.
Cambridge’s numbers set the scale. In the 2025 cycle it received 1,647 applications for Economics from all countries and accepted 164, a success rate of 10.0%, which its course page gives as 10 applications per place. It asks for A*A*A with Mathematics, and most of its recent A-level entrants had studied Economics (93%). It publishes applications by country but not by country and course together: the UAE row shows 130 applications and 8 acceptances across every course, a success rate of 6.2%, and there is no figure for UAE Economics applicants alone. Oxford reports, for Economics and Management, 18% of applicants interviewed and 5% successful, with an intake of 82 as a three-year average for 2023–25, and it publishes no success rate by country.
Cambridge can move an interview for exams, but in most cases not for holidays. A Dubai family planning to travel over the break should tell Cambridge where it will be, rather than hope to move a date. Our guides to the Oxford Economics and Management interview and the Cambridge Economics interview cover what happens once the call connects.
Before either interview: Economics I — £180
Written by specialist tutors, Economics I is ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, each with prompts and a worked answer: a monopolist’s cost curves, a budget constraint, an ice-cream-van location game and Bayes’ theorem. It suits an Oxford E&M or a Cambridge Economics applicant alike. There is no free Economics sample.
For what happens in the room at either university, start with our Oxford and Cambridge economics interview guide, and for the pack contents, the Economics interview questions page. Cambridge is right to warn that commercial interview services are not endorsed by the University and have no access to any exclusive information. Our packs are our own practice questions in the style of the interview, never recalled ones.
Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 from 59 reviews on Trustpilot, and 91% of our students reach their target grades. That is the company’s rating and the company’s outcome figure, not a rating of any individual pack, and neither is an endorsement by either university.
Oxford’s Economics and Management row gives first college interviews on Wednesday 9, Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December 2026, decisions on second college interviews by 10am on Monday 14 December, and second college interviews on Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 December. Oxford gives its times in UK time (GMT), so the 10am decision reaches the UAE at 14:00. Oxford can ask candidates to attend outside these dates, with at least 24 hours’ notice of an additional interview, and it does not rearrange interview times.
For part of them. KHDA’s 2026–27 calendar starts the winter break for Dubai private schools on Monday 14 December, in both its September-start and April-start tables. Oxford’s E&M first interviews on 9 to 11 December therefore fall in the last week of term, while the second-college decision and interviews fall in the break. Cambridge’s interview period runs from 7 to 18 December, across both. Schools in Abu Dhabi and the other emirates set their own dates, so check yours.
Oxford lists CBSE Year XII as an accepted qualification; read the grades it asks for on Oxford’s international qualifications page. Cambridge does not list Economics among the courses for which some Colleges accept CBSE Class XII, and for a course off that list it strongly recommends further study, such as A Levels, the International Baccalaureate, or 5 or more AP tests at score 5 plus A1 grades in five relevant Class XII subjects.
No. CBSE teaches all of its microeconomics in Class XI, and the only market form on its list is perfect competition, limited to the short run. It does teach marginal revenue, marginal cost and the producer’s equilibrium where the two are equal, so a CBSE student has the tools for a monopoly question and needs practice using them on a firm that sets its own price. Oxford says its E&M interview is not a test of economics studied previously.
That affects only students at schools following the Ministry curriculum, whose calendar marks 7 to 11 December as the continuation of end-of-term exams. Oxford does not rearrange interview times. A missed paper moves to the make-up week of 14 to 18 December, and the Ministry warns that make-up exams include questions of higher difficulty. Cambridge accepts exams as a reason in question 8.2 of its application. Oxford does not accept the Tawjihiyya, so a student in this position also holds other qualifications.
Churchill, Emmanuel, King’s and Selwyn interview every applicant in person, and Pembroke and Trinity let applicants based outside the UK choose. Every other College that teaches Economics interviews overseas applicants online, and Newnham does not teach it. Churchill is also one of six Colleges that require Further Maths for Economics, and on our reading of Cambridge’s two tables it is the only one of the six that interviews overseas applicants in person.
No. Our free samples cover nine subjects and Economics is not one of them. Economics I and Economics II are £180 each, and each is ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, with prompts and a worked answer. Nobody outside the Colleges has the real questions, and Cambridge says paid interview services are not endorsed by the University and do not have access to any exclusive information.
The two Economics packs — £180 each
Economics I works through consumer and firm microeconomics, location games and probability; Economics II through market failure, macroeconomic policy and pure-maths puzzles. Each is ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, with prompts and a worked answer, one PDF each. Neither has a free sample; our nine free samples cover other subjects.
Oxbridge interviews from Dubai and the UAE carries the KHDA and Ministry calendars, the College format table and visas. Oxbridge interview time zones for overseas applicants covers the clock in every country. Second college interviews at Oxford explains the Monday callback. The same subject sits against two other school calendars in our guides to the Oxbridge Economics interview from Singapore and the Oxbridge Economics interview from the USA. The Oxbridge interview question hub lists every pack and free sample.