Oxford interviews Physics applicants between Wednesday 9 December and Tuesday 15 December 2026, and Dubai’s winter break starts on Monday 14 December. The three international A-level physics specifications taught in the city do not teach the same course.
Oxford’s published timetable interviews Physics applicants at two colleges between Wednesday 9 December and Tuesday 15 December 2026. KHDA closes every Dubai private school for the winter break on Monday 14 December. Three of those interview days are ordinary school days and two are holiday, which makes Physics the one subject in this family whose window sits on both sides of the break.
The harder question is not the calendar. “Physics” in a Dubai classroom can mean at least five different documents, and three of them are international A levels from three different boards. They are not interchangeable, and the way they differ is the opposite of what most applicants expect.
The syllabus is fixed. The unfamiliar problem is not.
Whichever specification your school entered you for, the interview turns on a problem you have not met before, reasoned through out loud. Dynamics and Fields is the Physics pack on our hub: ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, written by specialist subject tutors, each with prompts and a worked answer, at £180 — one of 30 packs across 17 subjects at £180 each. Physics is one of the nine subjects with a free sample, which is a separate download rather than part of any pack, so you can read one of our questions first.
See the Dynamics and Fields pack — £180Dates and syllabus content on this page are for 2027 entry, read at source on 24 September 2026 from each awarding body’s own specification, from Oxford’s and Cambridge’s admissions pages and from the KHDA academic calendar. School-calendar claims here are Dubai claims: ADEK lets each Abu Dhabi school set its own dates, so an Abu Dhabi family should check their school’s ADEK-approved calendar. Your invitation, and your own exam entry, always govern your case.
Oxford publishes its interview windows course by course. The Physics row reads: “Interviews at two colleges will take place between Wednesday 9 December and Tuesday 15 December.” Cambridge does not publish per-course windows; its main interview period for 2027 entry is 7 December to 18 December 2026, with a winter pool round around mid to late January 2027.
Set the Oxford row against the Dubai calendar and it splits in two. KHDA’s academic calendar for September-start private schools gives 14 December 2026 as the “Start of winter break – All schools”, with classes resuming on 4 January 2027. So Wednesday 9, Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December are term-time school days, and Monday 14 and Tuesday 15 December are the first two days of the holiday. That comparison is ours: we set Oxford’s published Physics row against KHDA’s published break date, and against the other courses we have already mapped. It matters because the two halves of the window pose different problems. In the school week the problem is a quiet room and a reliable connection in the middle of a teaching day. In the holiday week the problem is travel: families leave Dubai in the first days of the break, and an interview does not move.
Physics is unusual in this. Oxford interviews Medicine on 14 and 15 December, wholly inside the break; it may interview overseas Engineering candidates from 7 December, wholly inside the last school week; Mathematics sits 14 to 17 December, wholly in the holiday. Only the Physics row straddles. And the pre-organised window is not the whole story: Oxford gives a minimum of 24 hours’ notice of additional interviews, and those run later, so treat 9 to 15 December as the first interviews rather than the complete set.
The clock is the easy part. The UAE is UTC+4, so a 09:00 UK interview is 13:00 in Dubai and a 17:00 UK interview is 21:00 — civilised hours at both ends, which not every country in this family gets. Every one of these calendar claims is a Dubai claim. ADEK allows each Abu Dhabi school to set its own dates inside boundaries held in a system it does not publish, so an Abu Dhabi applicant should read their own school’s ADEK-approved calendar and not this paragraph. The full country picture — the College formats, the visa arithmetic and the UAE admissions figures — is on our guide for UAE applicants; of the 130 applications Cambridge received from the UAE in the 2025 cycle, 9 received offers.
Oxford’s Department of Physics answers this in one sentence: “Admissions interviews for the Department of Physics are purely academic in nature and, while there is no formal syllabus, knowledge of the entrance test syllabus material will be assumed.” That is unusually concrete. It means the assumed floor is not your A level. It is the ESAT.
Every Oxford Physics applicant sits three fixed ESAT modules — Mathematics 1, Mathematics 2 and Physics — and the ESAT content specification states that the Physics module assumes “topics labelled ‘P’, and topics labelled ‘M’, in Appendix 1”. Appendix 1 lists seven: P1 Electricity, P2 Magnetism, P3 Mechanics, P4 Thermal physics, P5 Matter, P6 Waves and P7 Radioactivity, with thirty-two sub-topics between them. There is no astronomy heading, no cosmology heading, no medical physics and no oscillations. P1 opens with charging by friction and recognising basic circuit symbols.
Read those two facts together and the shape of the interview changes. The floor an Oxford interviewer assumes is narrower and lower than the A level you are sitting. Everything your specification taught you above that line is material you can bring, and material the test never sampled. The department also says what fills the time: interviews “will principally consist of maths and physics questions”, and you are likely to spend the great majority of the time on physics or mathematics rather than on your personal statement. Some colleges split maths and physics across two interviews; others combine them.
The surrounding machinery is published too, and is worth knowing before December. The primary shortlisting criterion is the ESAT score, read with contextual data, and it cuts a field running at eight to ten applicants per place down to around 2.5 per place. Every shortlisted candidate is interviewed twice by a first college and once by a randomly assigned second college, and all interviews are virtual. We go through what happens in the room, mark by mark, on our Oxford Physics after the ESAT page, and the general subject guide is our Oxbridge physics interview guide.
KHDA’s 2024-25 open data counts 144,307 pupils in UK-curriculum private schools in Dubai, 99,603 in Indian-curriculum schools and 27,467 in IB schools. Those are whole-school pupil numbers, not Oxbridge applicants, and nobody publishes the curriculum split of UAE Oxbridge applicants — so this page will not tell you what “most” UAE applicants sit. It will tell you what the documents say, so you can find your own.
If your school calls it an A level, it is one of three things. Cambridge accepts all three: “We accept international A levels offered by Cambridge International, Oxford AQA or Pearson Edexcel, as they are comparable to UK AS and A levels.” Comparable describes the standard, not the contents page. Cambridge International 9702 is the syllabus for exams in 2025, 2026 and 2027, examined in June and November with a March series for India. Pearson Edexcel’s International A Level (YPH11) is modular, with each unit available in January, June and October — and its own specification states that these qualifications “are not accredited or regulated by any UK regulatory body”, which does not stop Cambridge accepting them. OxfordAQA 9630 is five units, each worth a fifth of the International A-level, with exams “available in January and May/June” and any unit resittable within the specification’s shelf life.
If you are at an IB school, the route is a different one again, and we are not going to describe its content: the IB’s own subject guide could not be read at source for this page, so read yours yourself and map it against those seven ESAT physics topics. Cambridge’s published minimum offer level for Natural Sciences is 41 to 42 points with 776 at Higher Level. If you are on CBSE, the question is acceptance before content, and it has a hard answer further down this page. If you are on the Ministry of Education curriculum, the Tawjihiyya alone will not carry an Oxbridge application, which the same section covers.
The practical instruction is short: find your exam entry, not your school’s prospectus, and read the board and the unit or paper codes on it. Nobody publishes which board UAE schools use, and two students in the same corridor can be on different ones.
No — and this is the correction worth arriving with, because the natural inference runs the other way. Our Engineering page for Dubai applicants sets out a real and documented problem in international A-level Maths: several permitted routes let a student finish an A level in mathematics having met no mechanics at all. It would be reasonable to assume physics works the same way. It does not.
Pearson’s specification is explicit: “This qualification consists of six externally examined units… Candidates wishing to take the International Advanced Level must, therefore, complete all six units.” There is no applied-unit choice to get wrong. Cambridge International 9702 at A Level is the eleven AS topics plus topics 12 to 25, with no optional papers in the content at all — Paper 4 covers the A Level syllabus and Paper 5 is planning, analysis and evaluation. OxfordAQA 9630 runs 3.1 to 3.13 plus practical and analytical skills, again with no optional route.
There is one genuine caveat, and it is structural rather than optional. 9702 publishes “three routes”: AS Level only, the A Level staged over two years, or the A Level taken in one series. A candidate on the AS-only route has topics 1 to 11 and stops before motion in a circle, gravitational fields, thermodynamics, oscillations, electric fields, magnetic fields, quantum physics, nuclear physics, medical physics and astronomy. That is a large part of what an interviewer would reach for. AS-only candidates are graded a to e rather than A* to E, so your statement of entry shows which you are on.
The same correction runs the other way against a claim you may meet elsewhere. Our Hong Kong physics page reports, from the HKDSE guide’s own topic list, that HKDSE Physics contains no simple harmonic motion at all. That is true of the HKDSE and is not true of you: 9702 teaches oscillations as topic 17, and Pearson puts oscillations in Unit 5. A gap belongs to a document, never to a country.
Gravitational fields, orbits and escape velocity — £180
Every specification on this page teaches gravitational fields; none of them asks you to talk one through. Dynamics and Fields covers escape velocity, geosynchronous orbit, the null point between the Earth and the Moon, an alpha particle's closest approach and a bungee jump — ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, set by specialist tutors and answered in full, at £180. The free Physics sample is a separate download and shows the format first.
Get Dynamics and Fields — £180 Read the free Physics sampleBecause none of the three drops content, the interesting differences are additions. Each board has decided to teach something the other two do not name, and each of those additions is the kind of material an interviewer enjoys pulling on.
| From the syllabus’s own contents list | Cambridge International 9702 | Pearson Edexcel International A Level | OxfordAQA 9630 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | 25 topics; AS is 1–11, A Level adds 12–25 | 6 units, all compulsory | Sections 3.1–3.13 plus practical skills |
| Optional route that removes content | None | None | None |
| Astronomy and cosmology | Yes — topic 25, compulsory | Yes — Unit 5, “Astrophysics and Cosmology” | No — the list ends at 3.13 Energy sources |
| Medical physics | Yes — topic 24, compulsory | Not a named unit | Not a named section |
| Rotational motion, moment of inertia | Not a named topic | Not a named unit | Yes — section 3.13.1 |
| Exam series | June and November (March for India) | January, June and October, unit by unit | January and May/June |
| In the ESAT Physics module’s own topic list? | No astronomy, no cosmology, no medical physics and no rotational dynamics. The list is P1 Electricity, P2 Magnetism, P3 Mechanics, P4 Thermal physics, P5 Matter, P6 Waves, P7 Radioactivity. | ||
Cambridge International 9702 ends its A Level contents list with two topics that have no counterpart in the ESAT list: “24 Medical physics” and “25 Astronomy and cosmology”. Topic 25 is not a gesture. It requires candidates to “recall and use Wien’s displacement law… to estimate the peak surface temperature of a star”, to use the Stefan–Boltzmann law, to combine the two to estimate a star’s radius, and to “recall and use Hubble’s law… and explain how this leads to the Big Bang theory”. A 9702 candidate can be asked why a standard candle is standard, and has been taught the answer.
Pearson’s Unit 5 is titled Thermodynamics, Radiation, Oscillations and Cosmology, and its content overview names Astrophysics and Cosmology outright. Unit 4 names Further Mechanics, Electric and Magnetic Fields, and Nuclear and Particle Physics. So a Pearson candidate arrives with cosmology too, sat in the same paper as oscillations.
OxfordAQA 9630 goes the other way. Its contents list ends at “3.13 Energy sources” and contains no astronomy or cosmology section at all. What it has instead is section 3.13.1, Rotational Motion: moment of inertia for a point mass and for an extended object, angular displacement, angular speed and angular acceleration. Neither of the other two specifications names a rotational-dynamics topic, and an OxfordAQA candidate is therefore the only one of the three who has been taught to think about a rotating rigid body before the interview.
How to use that. Do not treat an addition as a party trick to deploy. Treat it as the part of the conversation where you are on firm ground, and say plainly what you have covered when you are asked — an interviewer who knows you have met Hubble’s law can take a question somewhere more interesting than one who does not. 9702 also spends a fifth of the whole A Level on experimental skills and investigations, assessed in Papers 3 and 5, which is unusually good preparation for the “how would you measure that?” turn a physics interview often takes. And Paper 1 is forty multiple-choice questions, so if your practice has been mostly multiple choice, that is the habit to break before December: the interview scores how you reason aloud, not which option you land on.
This is the section where acceptance decides more than content, and it has a hard answer that no other page on this search gives.
Cambridge publishes the list of courses for which some Colleges accept CBSE Class XII. It runs to twenty-three courses, from Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic through to Veterinary Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine is the only science on it. Natural Sciences is not on the list. That is established from Cambridge’s own list rather than from a search of the page, and it settles the question for a Dubai Indian-curriculum student aiming at Cambridge physics. Cambridge does name CBSE Physics Class XII elsewhere on the same page — “If you are applying for Design we advise you to take the CBSE Physics Class XII qualification and Mathematics” — which shows the qualification is recognised; it is the course that is not.
Cambridge also names twenty Colleges that accept CBSE for those listed courses. Three of the twenty — Hughes Hall, St Edmund’s and Wolfson — admit mature students only, so a school-leaver is choosing among seventeen. For a course that is not on the list Cambridge is direct about the alternative: further study, with A Levels, the IB, or five or more Advanced Placement tests at score 5 named as examples. In practice, a CBSE student in Dubai who wants Cambridge Natural Sciences needs a second qualification, and the time to discover that is Year 11, not November of Year 13. Oxford is the more open door here: it accepts CBSE Year XII.
The Ministry of Education route is narrower still. Cambridge’s UAE entry says applicants with the Tawjihiyya alone “will not be competitive and are unlikely to be successful”, and lists A Levels, the IB or five APs at score 5 plus a Tawjihiyya grade of at least 95 as suitable alternatives. Oxford marks the Tawjihiyya “Not accepted”. It is worth saying plainly, because it also settles a calendar question: the Ministry’s December exam weeks bind schools following the Ministry curriculum, and that is the one cohort whose school-leaving certificate will not by itself carry an Oxbridge application.
Oxford admits physicists to a physics course. Cambridge admits them to Natural Sciences, and the difference shows up at the interview rather than at the test.
The ESAT requirement for Natural Sciences is Mathematics 1 plus any two modules freely chosen from Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics 2, so the test never recorded which stream you declared. The interview is where the declaration first bites. Cambridge says so in its own words: “Your choice of application stream, and the courses that you are currently studying, will affect the types of questions that are asked at interview,” and, for the Physical stream, “It is best to apply for Physical Sciences if you have studied Physics and Maths A levels. This is because your interview will be on subjects that you have already studied.”
That sentence is the reason this whole page exists. If the interview follows what you have actually studied, then which of the three specifications your school entered you for is not administrative detail — it is the syllabus of your interview. A candidate who can say “I have done cosmology, not rotational dynamics” is giving the interviewer something useful; a candidate who says “A level physics” is not.
The numbers are published. Natural Sciences took 5 applications per place in the 2025 cycle and accepted 576. The minimum offer level is A*A*A, or 41 to 42 IB points with 776 at Higher Level, and the subject requirement is Mathematics plus two other science or mathematics subjects. Our Cambridge Natural Sciences Physical page works through the stream question in detail, and the wider overseas picture is on our guide for applicants outside the UK.
Here is a collision nothing on this search mentions, and it belongs specifically to the modular route.
Cambridge places winter pool interviews “around mid to late January 2027”. Pearson’s final January 2027 International A Level timetable runs its six physics units from Monday 11 January to Monday 25 January, so the two overlap for most of their length: Unit 1 on Monday 11 January, Unit 2 on Wednesday 13 January, Unit 3 on Friday 15 January, Unit 4 on Tuesday 19 January, Unit 5 on Thursday 21 January and Unit 6 on Monday 25 January. If you are entered for a January unit and you are pooled, the two can land on the same day. Only a candidate actually entered for a January unit is affected, so check your statement of entry before you worry about it.
The trap is that nothing collects it. The application asks you to “Provide the date(s) that you are not available during the first 3 weeks in December, and the reason why” — December only. A January exam is outside the question. So raise it with the College directly, in writing, the moment a pool interview is offered, and raise it with your exams officer at the same time. Cambridge does name exams among the exceptional circumstances for which it may reschedule: “We cannot reschedule interviews, unless under exceptional circumstances. This may include unavoidable commitments such as hospital appointments or illness, religious observance or exams.”
OxfordAQA candidates should check too. Its specification says “Exams will be available in January and May/June”, and that a unit may be resat any number of times within the specification’s shelf life, so a staged or resitting OxfordAQA candidate can also be sitting a paper in January. We have not read an OxfordAQA January 2027 timetable, so no dates are given here — ask your exams officer for yours.
Two notes to keep this in proportion. Cambridge International candidates do not have this problem: 9702 is examined in the June and November series, with a March series for India, so nothing falls in December or January. And the December fortnight itself is clear of external papers on every one of these routes. On the December question, the application also asks whether you are available during the first three weeks in December, and which country and time zone you will be in. That is not a new question — Cambridge’s own change log dates it to the September 2024 edition, for 2025 entry — and it exists so Colleges can schedule an online interview at a sensible hour for you. Exams are a reason Cambridge accepts; holidays, sports matches and concert rehearsals are ones it names and refuses, and the field is capped at 300 characters.
In order, and shortest first.
The same question, asked of a different school system, is on our physics page for applicants from the USA, where the problem is an absence rather than a divergence.
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 timetable puts Physics interviews at two colleges between Wednesday 9 December and Tuesday 15 December 2026. For a Dubai private school that window falls on both sides of the winter break: 9, 10 and 11 December are ordinary school days, and the break starts on Monday 14 December for all schools, so 14 and 15 December are holiday. Keep both weeks free, because additional interviews come with as little as 24 hours' notice. A 09:00 start in UK time is 13:00 in Dubai and a 17:00 start is 21:00. These dates are Dubai's; Abu Dhabi schools set their own calendar with ADEK, so check your own school's.
Not in the way an international A-level in maths can. Pearson Edexcel's International A Level in Physics is six externally examined units and a candidate must complete all six. Cambridge International 9702 at A Level is all twenty-five topics. OxfordAQA 9630 runs from 3.1 to 3.13 with no optional route either. None of the three lets you drop content the way an A-level Maths route can drop mechanics. The one real caveat is that 9702 can be taken as AS Level only, which is topics 1 to 11 and stops before gravitational fields, oscillations, quantum physics and astronomy.
Seven. The ESAT content specification says the Physics module assumes the topics labelled P, and those are P1 Electricity, P2 Magnetism, P3 Mechanics, P4 Thermal physics, P5 Matter, P6 Waves and P7 Radioactivity, with thirty-two sub-topics between them. There is no astronomy, no cosmology, no medical physics and no oscillations heading among them. Oxford's Department of Physics says its interviews assume knowledge of the entrance test syllabus material, so that list is the floor the interviewer starts from, not the ceiling.
No. Cambridge publishes the list of courses for which some Colleges accept CBSE Class XII, and it runs to twenty-three courses of which the only science is Veterinary Medicine. Natural Sciences is not on it. Cambridge does name CBSE Physics Class XII, but only as advice for applicants to Design. For a course that is not on the list Cambridge recommends further study, and names A Levels, the IB and five or more Advanced Placement tests at score 5. Oxford does accept CBSE Year XII.
For Natural Sciences the published minimum offer level is 41 to 42 points with 776 at Higher Level, alongside Mathematics and two other science or mathematics subjects at Higher Level or equivalent. We make no claim on this page about what IB Higher Level Physics teaches, because we could not read the IB's own subject guide at source, so check your guide yourself and map it against the seven ESAT physics topics rather than trusting a summary.
They can, if you are placed in the winter pool. Cambridge puts winter pool interviews around mid to late January 2027, and Pearson's final January 2027 timetable puts all six International A Level physics units between Monday 11 January and Monday 25 January. The application's availability field asks only about the first three weeks in December, so nothing in the form collects a January date. Raise it with the College directly, in writing, as soon as a pool interview is offered: Cambridge names exams among the exceptional circumstances for which it may reschedule.
Yes. The application asks whether you are available during the first three weeks in December, which country and time zone you will be in, and for any dates you cannot do with the reason. This is not a new question: Cambridge's own change log dates it to the September 2024 edition, for 2025 entry. Exams are a reason Cambridge accepts; holidays, sports matches and concert rehearsals are ones it names and refuses, and the field is capped at 300 characters, so be brief and specific.
No. Nobody outside the Colleges has the real questions, and Cambridge says in its own words that fee-charging interview services are not endorsed by the University and have no access to any exclusive information. Dynamics and Fields is our own practice questions in the style of the interview, written by specialist subject tutors: ten questions, each with prompts and a worked answer, at £180. Physics is one of the nine subjects with a free sample, which is a separate download you can read before deciding.
Before 9 December — Dynamics and Fields, £180
Ten of our own practice questions in the style of the interview, each with prompts and a worked answer, written by specialist subject tutors, at £180 — one of 30 packs across 17 subjects at £180 each. Physics is one of the nine subjects with a free sample, which is its own download rather than part of any pack. Derivations is badged Maths rather than Physics, but its momentum, first-principles and SHM derivations suit a physicist too.
Get Dynamics and Fields — £180 Read the free Physics sampleOur guide for UAE applicants covers the December calendar, the Ministry of Education exam weeks and the Colleges that interview in person. For the route question asked of mathematics rather than physics, see our Engineering page for Dubai applicants. For each university on its own, read Oxford Physics after the ESAT and Cambridge Natural Sciences (Physical), and for what happens in the room, our Oxbridge physics interview guide. The specifications quoted here are published in full by Cambridge International and Pearson, and Oxford’s own statement about what its interviews assume is on the Department of Physics interviews page. What is inside the pack is set out on our Physics interview questions page.