In defence of the Oxbridge interview

Simon Hughes’ desire (£) to stop Oxbridge academics interviewing potential students is muddle headed as well as an attack on the right of these universities to run their own affairs. If the coalition wants universities to pick on academic potential rather than academic performance to date, then the interview is a crucial part of this process.

Sitting down with an applicant gives academics a chance to assess how this student’s mind works, to ask questions that they haven’t been drilled for. It allows them to use their professional discretion in choosing to make, say, a lower offer to a pupil from an underperforming school who in the interview demonstrates that they have huge amounts off potential despite not having stellar exam results.

Hughes’ criticism appears to be that the interview gives a chance for ‘bonding between a prospective student and their prospective teacher’. But it is this bond — and the fact that academics feel personally responsible for those that they’ve admitted — that helps keeps the quality of teaching so high at Oxbridge.