Oxbridge vetting process remains a riddle to hopefuls

IF YOU'RE 17 and want to go to Oxbridge, here's the kind of riddle you've got to be able to tackle. Last month, I got the answer "wrong" in my interview and didn't get in. You, however, may be luckier. Try it.

"A man goes into the desert carrying a water bottle. At night, when he sleeps, one of his enemies pours poison into it. Later, another enemy punches holes in it so all the liquid runs out. Both of his enemies' actions are filmed. Not knowing any of this, the man gets up next morning and walks into the desert, where he dies of thirst."

I was asked: "Which of the two enemies, when arrested, would be found guilty of the man's attempted murder?".

I was being interviewed for one of the eight places on the economics and management degree course at an Oxford college. More than 90 had applied and 51 had been called for interview.

With hindsight, I might have got the right answer to that riddle (if you haven't guessed, it's "neither of them"). But hindsight's a wonderful thing and it's just what you don't have when you're a pupil at a Scottish state school, where you don't get any training in what to expect from an Oxbridge interview, and when the exams you have taken are different to almost everyone else's.

There is, apparently, a special course you can take to help candidates to get through, but it costs about 4,000. But would that guarantee you getting the answer to the riddle right? I doubt it.

If you are thinking about applying, however, let me save you some of that 4,000. Here are some of the lessons I've learnt about the process of trying. I hope they're useful.

First of all, is an Oxford interview worth all the stress it might cause you, if all the odds are so much against you (51-to-eight, even before any extra hurdle of coming from a country with an exam system that seems to be a bit of an unknown entity to the interviewers)? Absolutely. I've no regrets about that. The interviewers were charming, the applicants friendly, articulate and intelligent and you get to stay for up to four days in college in a beautiful city with all your meals paid for (my nearest equivalent course at Cambridge doesn't offer any of that, though they do interview more candidates).

But one thing really surprised me about the whole process. Back in Edinburgh, I've heard that some people say it is a positive disadvantage to apply to Oxbridge from a private school because these days entry levels are weighted in favour of entrants from state schools.

On the evidence of what I saw, this is not true. Just the opposite. Over the fours day I was in Oxford, I must have met about 100 candidates. One of the first things you ask when you meet another candidate is where they're from and which school they go to.

I've got no bias against people who go to private school – indeed, my own state school a bit of an oddity in that a private school has generously agreed to teach me advanced higher economics for free.

But, before going down to Oxford, I thought the candidates would be roughly equally divided between ones from state and private schools. Instead, of the 100 candidates I met, only about three were from state schools. I was the only Scot.

More hindsight. When the invigilators tell you in the written test not to write anything for the first 15 minutes, they don't mean that you can't make notes (as everyone else was doing). I took the instruction seriously, stared at the questions for 15 minutes without making any notes, and then ran into huge time problems. I wish I'd have known that – or, with hindsight, asked.

Another thing. In the interview, don't automatically expect to be asked about your subject. I was asked almost more about the other two subjects I can't wait to drop, rather than economics, which is the subject I love and want to study.

In fairness, perhaps I'd already done so badly in the written test that the interviewers were only going through the motions. Certainly they didn't push me as hard as I expected. There was nothing about current events (interest rates, Northern Rock or climate change economics), but there was a good one on Scotland (why does its economy under-perform England's when it's got proportionately more graduates)?

Then there was the riddle and, after that, I seemed to lose my way a bit. I was annoyed with myself. While I think the interview went reasonably well, I know I could easily have done a much better.

But while I enjoyed seeing Oxford's dreaming spires, and meeting the other candidates – and while I accept that my experience might not be typical – I've got one riddle of my own to ask the examiners: if they really take on so few candidates from state schools, what do they feel when they read (as they would have done last week) that social mobility in Britain is the bottom of international league tables for social mobility?

Don't tell me, I bet it's surprise.

Jane McKay is the pseudonym of a pupil at a state secondary school in Edinburgh.