London: The Oxford University has released a series of questions to mark the deadline for students to apply to study there in 2015.
The university asked admissions tutors to open up about the interviews that all UK undergraduate applicants are subjected to and what the admissions officers are looking for, the Guardian reported.
An admissions tutor for psychology at University College Nick Yeung's question asks, why are Welsh speakers worse at remembering phone numbers than English speakers?
Yeung said that this question is meant to be deliberately provocative, in that he hopes that it engages candidates' intuitions that Welsh people aren't simply less clever than English people.
Yeung, who hopes that the student would pick out the connection between memory and how easy to spell or pronounce a word is, reveals that the key point is that numbers are spelled differently and are longer in Welsh than in English and it turns out that memory and arithmetic depend on how easily pronounced the words are.
Stephen Tuck, a fellow at Pembroke College, said that the question "How much of the past can you count?" gets at all sorts of issues relating to historical evidence, adding that much of the interview would be taken up with discussing in depth the history courses the students have studied.
However, a former admissions tutor at a Russell Group university said that it seems to him though that by revealing the mysteries of the interview, Oxford is continuing the fetishisation and it is Oxford, not interviews, that are weird.
