Oxford All Souls College General Examination (2025) [pdf]

https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-10/General%202025.pdf

36•gregsadetsky•2h ago

Comments

nateb2022•1h ago

(2025)

dnnddidiej•1h ago

To all the yes/no questions the answer is yes.

wocka•1h ago

ἡμεῖς πάντες οὐδὲν ἀλλ' ἢ κόνις ἐν ἀνέμῳ. Oh, I don’t speak Greek.

spoonyvoid7•1h ago

It would've helped to share some context y'know -> https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/examination-fellowships-general-inf...

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

alephnerd•1h ago

A good comparison by American standards would be the UChicago admissions essay prompt.

f_allwein•1h ago

I have another one:

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.

alephnerd•1h ago

Still by hand.

DiscourseFan•1h ago

I am generous towards the authors cited (Schiller, Benjamin), and I am unimpressed. Most of these questions constitute the “high middle brow” of intellectual thought: that thought which takes itself too seriously. Is this a recent development at Oxford, or has it always been the case that the university churns out relatively talented but predictably radical students, certainly ones who will not produce anything truly challenging, but whose work will at least seem challenging to those who have not really developed a strong method of inquiry on their own.

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.

ramraj07•1h ago

https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people/245 perhaps you can take a look and decide?

moab•1h ago

I'm not sure I agree. They're just essay prompts. One could write a bad essay that takes itself too seriously given the prompts, but one could also write a powerful essay starting from any of these prompts. I don't really see where you get the conclusion that students matriculating from these places have recently begun to be smoke-blowers that while possessing detailed knowledge of various arcana fail to produce anything useful.

DiscourseFan•50m ago

It’s not about highly specific knowledge: none of these questions are justifiable for a graduate level program, they are better served as prompts for essays that Americans write in their college applications. With these questions you are not going to be engaging with anything particularly deep, but you may produce something that sounds deep. But sounding deep and having actual depth are very different things, and the latter can often look very boring or painstaking, whereas the former always appears profound—and it seems like all of these questions are meant to help the student produce something “profound,” not necessarily something thoughtful or difficult.

spaghettifythis•2m ago

I think the prompts being "easy" in this way is sort of the point. An applicant can demonstrate their mastery of language and the topics they select, producing an essay that goes far beyond the obvious leading direction (which most of the questions have).

The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.

keiferski•46m ago

Oxford and its equivalent universities around the world (Harvard, Yale, and so on) are not really selecting for radically brilliant views on social or philosophical issues. At the end of the day, it's an institution training elites for business/government/etc. not a fund for intellectual brilliance.

dang•1h ago

Related. Others?

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)

david_shi•1h ago

For all its prestige, these read like Reddit AMA topics.

deepfriedbits•1h ago

The value is in the answers.

edavison1•56m ago

Hook me up with the password for the alternate dimension Reddit you visit, it is so much smarter than mine.

roncesvalles•54m ago

The "real" answer to the first question is simple: any sentence that would get you banned from most social media.

keiferski•51m ago

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?

MathMonkeyMan•45m ago

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.

xsist10•44m ago

> Does the fact that the United States of America has never experienced foreign occupation help us to understand its political culture?

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

MathMonkeyMan•41m ago

> The British occupation of Washington, D.C., lasted for roughly 26 hours.

Still technically correct :)

juggina•30m ago

>Why are most intellectuals left-wing?

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.

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Oxford All Souls College General Examination (2025) [pdf]

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