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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Some of these seem like questions that are expecting answers aligned with one ideological framing or another.

But I don’t actually know how All Souls selects for applicants – are there examples of people who argued against the prevailing opinions and still got accepted?

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I'm from a Cambridge background, not Oxford, but the trick to this sort of essay is that the journey is the destination. That is, ultimately it's not expecting you to reach a single right conclusion, but to present evidence, argument, and references.

The rubric doesn't say, but I'm guessing you'd get three hours per essay, one hour per question, minus the minutes spent selecting which ones.

Of course, but I am wondering if you wrote a brilliant essay arguing for a viewpoint that seems to go against the one underlying the selection of questions here, would it matter?

My guess is no, it wouldn’t. These questions all have pretty strong assumptions behind them, and so my guess is that they’re looking for people who fundamentally have the same opinions but are capable of communicating them well. And not someone that has different opinions, even if they communicate them well.

There isn't an "underlying selection of the questions" here, they're open ended, vague and look like they're chosen by a disconnected academic trying to be topical.

They're looking for a certain type of person, but we can't figure out who that is from the questions. We could probably do some cold reading just from knowing that it'll be a bunch of academics doing the assessing and they do tend to see the world in a certain way but there isn't anything to glean from the paper.

They’re looking for the type of person who can make an argument. That really is both what they say they are looking for and what they actually are looking for. No cold reading would be helpful or necessary.

Sounds like the cold read would be helpful? That basically is the cold read. You're not claiming any reason to think that beyond what a bunch of programmers know about the situation.

They publish what they are looking for in candidates, and they tell people at open days. The most relevant section is “What is the College looking for in candidates?”

https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/examination-fellowships-general-inf...

The examiners would delight in you entertaining them. It’s fine to argue anything, wilfully misinterpret the question or say outlandish things. All that matters is you give the examiner a window into your mind showing it to be clever and articulate and rounded?

I don't know, but many of them have a triggering smell, which must be on purpose. A polarizing prompt might show you what somebody thinks, but it is also likely to show you whether they think at all. I'm reminded of "This I Believe" on NPR. The subject is what a person believes, not what they don't believe.

I think it’s the opposite of what you’re implying - instead I expect that a response that was boringly in line with prevailing opinions would be marked as a poor response. As would one that was counter but only controversial for controversy’s sake.

The idea would be to present well thought out and interesting arguments, not to be an ideological filter to make sure people agree to prevailing opinions!

I definitely hope so, but most academic institutions don’t seem to be that open minded. Hopefully Oxford is unique enough to be different.

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