TL;DR: It's one of the papers you need to sit to become an Oxford All Souls Fellow.

What is lost when you put any of these in an LLM?

Yes, we can get plausible sounding answers generated algorithmically. But these are great starting points for humans to develop their own thinking.

My university, LSE, asked all students to write exam essays by hand ~10 years ago. Wonder how it is done at Oxford today.

I wanted to do a tour of the All Souls College last year but it was closed, unfortunately, on the day I walked by; I was only there for a two day conference and had to leave early the next morning.

All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44893522 - Aug 2025 (41 comments)

2024 general essay questions for Oxford 'All Souls' scholarship [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42793802 - Jan 2025 (15 comments)

Sample Questions from the All Souls Examination at Oxford - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346984 - Oct 2015 (5 comments)

I'm answering questions from the 'hardest exam in the world' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3971737 - May 2012 (38 comments)

All Souls College discontinues its tradition of the dreaded one word essay exam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385810 - May 2010 (1 comment)

All Souls: The toughest test you’ll ever take - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442852 - Jan 2009 (16 comments)

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?

Cough cough

> It was the only time since the American Revolutionary War that a foreign power had captured and occupied a United States capital. [Burning of Washington]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

I'd like to think this is a self-aware critique of filters just like this, ostensibly designed to keep those icky non-leftists out of academia.