PPE marks interviews out of 100 with five named bands. Physics marks them out of 10. There is no single Oxford scale, and the faculties publish their own.
Oxford faculties publish how they mark interviews, in annual reports written for applicants, and the scales are not the same as each other. PPE marks on 1–100 with five named bands. Physics marks each interview out of 10 and tells you what 6, 7 and 8 mean. English scores the paperwork 1–10 and reports the interview as a list of qualities. History publishes criteria and no number at all.
So the question “what is a good Oxford interview score” has four different answers depending on what you applied for. This page sets out what each of those four faculties actually publishes, in their own words, and what the numbers mean for a candidate interviewing in December 2026 for 2027 entry.
A scale you can see is a scale you can rehearse against
PPE tells you most admitted candidates score above 65. Physics tells you the average successful candidate scored 7.95. Neither number is reachable by knowing more content — both are awarded for how you reason while somebody is listening.
Our specialist tutors run mock interviews that push on exactly that, in your subject, using published questions. The subject interview packs at £180 each give you the reasoning written out to work through between sessions.
Oxford sets interview procedure per subject rather than centrally, and the practical consequence is that a mark means nothing until you know which faculty awarded it. A 7 in Physics is a good interview. A 7 in PPE would be a catastrophe, because PPE is marking out of 100.
That is not an inference. Each of these faculties publishes an annual document for applicants setting out how the cycle ran, and the marking sections are unusually candid. The four below are the ones that publish enough to compare. Their reports cover recent cycles rather than the one you are in, so read them as the published method rather than as this December’s numbers.
| Faculty | Interview scale published | What the report anchors it to |
|---|---|---|
| PPE | 1–100, up to three scores | Five named bands from Excellent to Very poor |
| Physics | Out of 10, three interviews | 6 acceptable, 7 good, average 8 or higher likely an offer |
| English | 1–10 on the UCAS form and written work | Mean scores at each stage; ten shortlisting bands |
| History | No numeric interview scale published | Six named abilities the interview measures against |
Our guide to what Oxbridge interviewers actually mark covers the university-wide machinery behind all of this — the Common Framework, central faculty banding, and why colleges are guided but not bound by it. This page is the layer underneath: the actual numbers the faculties put on the page.
PPE publishes the most detailed interview marking information at Oxford. Its applicant report for 2025-26 states: “Colleges assign candidates up to three interview scores. These do not have to be subject-specific. Interviews are marked on a 1-100 scale” — and then prints the bands.
| Mark | Band | What PPE says it means |
|---|---|---|
| 70–100 | Excellent | “A mark above 70 is a strong indicator for admission” |
| 65–69 | Positive | “Most candidates admitted will have interview scores above 65.” |
| 60–64 | Neutral | — |
| 50–59 | Weak | “A candidate with interview and test marks consistently below 60 is in a weak position” |
| 49 or less | Very poor | “Interview strongly suggests that the candidate is not suitable” |
Read the middle of that table carefully, because it is where most candidates actually land. The gap between Positive and Neutral is five marks, and the difference between them is the difference between an offer and a near miss. Nothing in the band descriptions is about knowledge.
The scale is also stable. PPE’s report for an earlier cycle prints the same sentence — “Interviews are marked on a 1-100 scale” — above the same five bands with the same thresholds. That earlier report is itself the fifth organic result for this question on Google, which tells you the numbers have been public for years and that nobody has explained them.
Two structural details sit alongside it. Up to three scores are assigned, and they “do not have to be subject-specific” — so a PPE candidate is not being marked once per discipline. And the scores do not stand alone: candidates are ranked afterwards on a combined measure built from the interview scores, the pre-interview test and contextualised GCSE information where available.
The test named in that report is the one PPE used in the cycle it describes. For 2027 entry PPE’s pre-interview test is TARA: its admissions criteria page describes existing achievement “as well as performance in the pre-interview TARA admissions test and interview” as evidence of future potential. If you are preparing now, that is the test in the combination.
For a sense of scale, the same report records a cycle with 1885 applicants at 7.85 applicants per place, of whom “681 applicants were shortlisted and 261 were offered places.” Our Oxford PPE interview page works through the kind of questions those interviews actually use.
There is no pack for “interview marking” — the packs are by subject
We publish subject interview packs at £180 each, each carrying ten questions with a worked answer. They are organised by what you applied for — Philosophy, Economics, History, English, Physics and the rest — not by admissions process, so there is nothing on this hub that maps onto this page’s topic. Pick the one matching your course. Some carry a free sample and some do not; the hub says which on each.
See every subject pack on the hubPhysics publishes a completely different scale, and attaches plain English to the numbers. Its admissions report for 2025-26 states: “Each interview is marked out of 10 based on the academic judgement of the interviewing tutors. The scale is such that a mark of 6 broadly corresponds to ‘acceptable’, 7 corresponds to ‘good’, and an average interview mark of 8 or higher will likely result in an offer.”
It then does something almost no admissions document does: it publishes the distribution. “Approximately 1% of interviews are scored as ‘10’.” And for the candidates who got in, “the average interview mark this year was 7.95 (8.00 in 2024).”
The single most reassuring sentence any Oxford faculty publishes is in the same section. Of the candidates who were accepted, “71 accepted applicants had one interview which scored less than a 7, and 9 accepted applicants had one interview which scored below 6.” Seventy-one people who got into Oxford Physics had an interview that went badly enough to be marked below ‘good’.
That is possible because of how the marks are used. Every shortlisted candidate gets three interviews: “two interviews given by a first-choice college and one interview given by a randomly allocated second-choice college.” Afterwards “the three interview marks are combined into a single score (out of 200)” — a scaling, not a sum — and the faculty is explicit that “Applicants are assessed based on the totality of information about the applicant with no one interview, by itself, decisive.”
The report also notes how badly candidates read their own performance: it is “extremely common for applicants to think that interviews which have gone well – even very well – have gone badly.” Our Oxford Physics interview page works through the kind of problems those three interviews use.
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English inverts the pattern. It scores heavily before the interview and reports the interview itself without a mark.
The UCAS application is graded, in English’s admissions feedback for 2024-25: “The mean UCAS grade for all applicants was 7.0. The mean grade for shortlisted applicants was 7.8, and 8.4 for those who went on to receive an offer.” Submitted written work is graded separately — “Work was marked centrally on a scale of 1-10, using the following criteria” — against eight published headings including attention to the literary aspects of chosen texts, independence of thought and coherence of argument.
Those scores are then “combined to create an initial grouping which put candidates in one of ten bands”, and the bands drive shortlisting. In the cycle the report covers, “672 applicants were shortlisted, which was approximately 2.8 candidates per offer made.”
For the interview itself English publishes a list of what tutors looked for rather than a scale: independent reading, capacity to exchange and build on ideas, clarity of thought and expression, analytical ability, flexibility of thought, independent thinking about literature, and readiness to read widely with discrimination. Our Oxford English interview page covers how those conversations run.
A mark out of 100 is only useful if you know what is being marked. PPE publishes that on its interviews page too, and it is a different list from its three headline admissions criteria: “Interviewers will be looking for evidence of the candidate’s potential for development in the following four areas.”
| Area | What PPE says it looks like |
|---|---|
| Understanding | Listening carefully, analysing problems, identifying the premises and conclusions of arguments, and expressing someone else’s ideas in your own words |
| Intellectual flexibility | Willingness to consider alternative views, and readiness to respond to problems and criticisms |
| Critical thinking and problem-solving | Logical and critical approaches, assessing arguments, identifying good and bad reasons for believing a claim, assessing relevance, thinking independently |
| Communication | Expressing ideas clearly, giving considered responses, and addressing the point under discussion instead of veering off topic |
Two of those four are about handling someone else’s material rather than producing your own. Understanding asks you to restate an argument that is not yours; Intellectual flexibility asks you to take a criticism and do something with it. A candidate who arrives with prepared positions and defends them is optimising against half the list.
The Communication row is the most quietly brutal, because it names a specific failure: veering off topic. That is what happens when a candidate hears a keyword, recognises something they revised, and answers the question they prepared for instead of the one they were asked.
These four areas are PPE’s, published on its own pages. Other faculties publish their own lists of different lengths — History names six abilities, English seven qualities — so there is no universal set of four across Oxford. What generalises is the shape: every published list is about reasoning in conversation, and our guide to thinking out loud in an Oxbridge interview works through what that sounds like in practice.
Both faculties that publish numbers also publish how much candidates move between colleges, and both frame it as mechanical rather than as a judgement.
Physics: “This year 90 applicants were reallocated to a different first-choice college at the time of shortlisting.” Its report adds that “Reallocation is not an indicator of the strength or weakness of an applicant” and that applicants with very high test scores can be reallocated.
PPE: “This year 127 applicants were reallocated. Applicants are sent to the college where they will have the best theoretical chance of success, based on where they will be ranked highest within the existing cohort of the college.” Read that sentence again — reallocation is designed to improve your odds, not to punish you.
English measures the same thing at the other end: “26.3% of candidates who were made offers received their offer from a college other than their first-choice college.” Better than one in four English offer-holders were admitted somewhere they did not apply.
Second interviews, by contrast, are genuinely rare in PPE: “This year 13 candidates were selected for second interviews.” Not being called back is the normal outcome, not a signal.
Oxford publishes its interview timetables per course, and they are not one block. Shortlisting news comes first: “All applicants will receive a letter or email indicating whether or not they have been invited for interview, usually between the middle of November and early December.”
| Course | Interview dates, 2027 entry |
|---|---|
| PPE | Most first college interviews Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 December; second college interviews from Friday 11 to Wednesday 16 December |
| Physics | Interviews at two colleges between Wednesday 9 and Tuesday 15 December |
| English Language and Literature | First college interviews 7 to 9 December; second college decisions by 2pm on Thursday 10 December |
| History | First college interviews 7 to 11 December; second college interviews 14 to 17 December |
The pattern to notice is that the second-college decision is a published deadline with a time on it, not a vague possibility. If you are a PPE candidate who has not heard by 4pm on Thursday 10 December, that is information. Our Oxford History interview page covers the subject with the longest window of the four.
No. Oxford sets interview procedure per subject, and the faculties that publish their marking publish different scales. PPE marks interviews on a 1–100 scale with five named bands. Physics marks each interview out of 10. English scores the UCAS form and written work 1–10 but reports the interview as a list of qualities rather than a number. History publishes criteria and no numeric interview scale at all. So there is no universal Oxford interview score, and a mark means nothing until you know which faculty gave it.
PPE publishes the bands. A mark of 70 or above is Excellent, and its report says “A mark above 70 is a strong indicator for admission”. The 65–69 band is Positive, and PPE adds that “Most candidates admitted will have interview scores above 65.” Below that, 60–64 is Neutral, 50–59 is Weak, and 49 or less is Very poor, described as an interview that “strongly suggests that the candidate is not suitable”. Colleges assign up to three interview scores per candidate.
Physics anchors its out-of-10 scale in words: “a mark of 6 broadly corresponds to ‘acceptable’, 7 corresponds to ‘good’, and an average interview mark of 8 or higher will likely result in an offer.” It also publishes the outcome: for applicants who were offered a place, the average interview mark was 7.95, against 8.00 the previous year. Top marks are rare — approximately 1% of interviews are scored as 10.
Yes, and Physics publishes the evidence. Among accepted applicants, “71 accepted applicants had one interview which scored less than a 7, and 9 accepted applicants had one interview which scored below 6.” Every shortlisted Physics candidate has three interviews, two at a first-choice college and one at a randomly allocated second-choice college, and the three marks are combined into a single score out of 200. The faculty states that applicants are assessed on the totality of the information with no one interview, by itself, decisive.
PPE publishes four areas: Understanding, Intellectual flexibility, Critical thinking and problem-solving, and Communication. Understanding covers listening carefully and expressing someone else’s ideas in your own words. Intellectual flexibility is willingness to consider alternative views and respond to criticism. Critical thinking and problem-solving covers assessing arguments and thinking independently. Communication includes addressing the point under discussion instead of veering off topic. This is PPE’s list — History publishes six abilities and English seven qualities, so it is not a universal Oxford four.
No, and both faculties that publish numbers say so. Oxford Physics states that “Reallocation is not an indicator of the strength or weakness of an applicant” and notes that applicants with very high test scores can be reallocated; in the cycle it reports, 90 applicants were reallocated at shortlisting. PPE reallocated 127 applicants and explains that they are sent to the college where they will have the best theoretical chance of success. In English, 26.3% of offers came from a college other than the applicant’s first choice.
In PPE it is rare: its report records that “This year 13 candidates were selected for second interviews” out of 681 shortlisted applicants. That is a different thing from a second-college interview, which is routine and scheduled in advance — Oxford’s published timetables give PPE second college interviews from Friday 11 to Wednesday 16 December. Not being recalled for an additional interview is the ordinary outcome and carries no signal about your chances.
Oxford says applicants “will receive a letter or email indicating whether or not they have been invited for interview, usually between the middle of November and early December.” The interviews themselves are timetabled by course: most PPE first college interviews are on Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 December, Physics interviews run at two colleges between Wednesday 9 and Tuesday 15 December, English first college interviews are 7 to 9 December, and History runs 7 to 11 December with second college interviews 14 to 17 December.
PPE publishes what it marks and Physics publishes what a good mark looks like. Our specialist tutors run mock interviews that push on those criteria in your subject, and the subject packs give you worked reasoning to study between sessions.
Leading Tuition is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 59 reviews. More than 95% of the students we support through selective applications receive an offer. Start with the subject interview packs, or read what Oxbridge interviewers actually mark for the university-wide machinery behind these scales.