Undergraduate applications

This page is about undergraduate admissions. For graduate admissions, click here.

St Hugh’s College Prospective Students Page | Exeter College Applicants Page | Faculty of Music Undergraduate Applications Page | University of Oxford Admissions

NB: This only applies to St Hugh’s and Exeter Colleges. Oxford is a collegiate university; admission is to a College in the first instance. Interviews and decision-making processes vary between colleges.

Getting selected for interview

Your initial application consists of the UCAS form, and, a bit later, your submitted work (see Faculty of Music Admissions). If you are not predicted at least AAA, we will almost certainly not select you for interview. This means that each one of three A Levels (excluding General Studies) must be at least an A. UCAS points-score equivalents do not count: we don’t count more than three A levels and an A* does not compensate for a B (even predictions of A*A*B will normally lead to deselection).

If you are invited to Oxford, your on-site testing will involve a short performance on your chosen instrument and an interview at your chosen college. (You will also have at least one other college interview at a college your did not choose). NB: For admissions in Dec 2022, remote interviews on Teams replace in-person interviews.

The interview

If you apply to St Hugh’s or Exeter Colleges to read for a BA in Music and are selected for interview, you will be interviewed by me (Professor Leach), and at least one other person, usually the College Lecturer. We will give you two tasks.

1. Prose summary and commentary
2. Music analysis

1. We will ask you to spend the first part of your interview time slot preparing a prose text–usually a short article by a musicologist. In the interview we will ask you to summarize the text and will then ask you one further question about the way in which it presents its argument (your ‘commentary’). This question will be given to you in advance, when you are given the text.

2. We will give you a short piece of music from the canon of Western tonal music (usually a piece by a composer such as Bach, Mozart, or Mendelssohn) and ask you about how it is structured. The piece and the exact question might or might not be given to you to prepare before the interview itself, but either way you will have as much time as you like to look through the piece before you give your answer.

What we don’t ask

At St Hugh’s and Exeter we will not ask you to do a keyboard test in the interview. We will not ask you about your submitted essays, compositions, or harmony and counterpoint exercises. We will not usually ask you about things on your UCAS form unless we require clarification of something (in which case, this will not form part of the decision-making process–see below).

We will not ask you any trick questions!

How we decide

If you are called to interview you can take it as read that your UCAS form and submitted essays have passed the test. The UCAS form and submitted work allow us to perform an initial round of evaluation: if we ask you anything further about them, it will not be part of the interview but just us making conversation!

We will decide whether to make you an offer purely on our judgement of your academic potential as shown in the two tasks outlined above. Because we give all the applicants the same test, we will be able to compare all the candidates and rank them. For us at St Hugh’s and Exeter, the excellence of your intellectual ability comes first. If you’re also a fantastic performer, we’d view that as an added bonus, but if you’re not, we won’t hold it against you if you show promise as a thinker and writer about music.