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Comment by apl | Hacker News Reader

One more thing to keep in mind: Cambridge and Oxford interviews are more about thought process than actual solutions. I've seen candidates with correct answers not get in while peers who never found an adequate solution make it.

Interesting questions, though.

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I should hope that's true of interviews everywhere.

It's worth noting as well that Oxford is by far the most theoretical of all the CS departments in the UK.

Sorry, what is your source for this?

As a student at Cambridge, I doubt Oxford is "far" more theoretical. The London Universities like Imperial are also notable for focusing on theory over practice.

I think they assume we can learn practical skills on-the-fly and they are not as beneficial as a solid theoretical grounding.

These Oxford interview questions are more difficult than I expected, especially under Oxbridge interview conditions. Like mentioned above, they want to see how you think over what you already know.

Generally all the top-tier universities are more theoretical than the lower tier universities.

Historically Oxford has been much more focused on the rigorous underpinning of CS by Mathematics than other universities, although in recent years they've been cutting down on this and moving closer to the CS syllabus offered by other top-tier universities.

Here's the course list for first year at Oxford:

  • Functional Programming 
  • Design & Analysis of Algorithms 
  • Imperative Programming I 
  • Imperative Programming II 
  • Digital Systems 
  • Discrete Mathematics 
  • Logic and Proof 
  • Linear Algebra 
  • Calculus 
  • Probability

Unless you do CS with Mathematics at Cambridge, you'll probably be doing a much less mathematically intensive course.

In the first year all of us do Computer Science (2 papers), Mathematics (1 paper), and a science subject (1 paper, I did Physics). It is predominantly theoretical (something I found hard to cope with):

1st year: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0809/part1a-cst.html

2nd year: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/part1b.html

3rd year: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/part2.html

Although I think there is far too much content to learn thoroughly in three years, it does provide a broad understanding of what there is to know. Does Oxford have online course material, I'd be interested to take a look? I expect the universities overlap a lot but there might be some worthwhile additions.

Perhaps "theoretical" is the wrong word, what I meant is that Oxford courses tend to take a more formal & mathematical approach to topics than other universities.

As someone who studied computer science at Cambridge, I can assure you that Cambridge teaches at a very formal and mathematical level.

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