Oxford and Cambridge really couldn’t give a stuff about all your extracurriculars. You’ve either got the intellectual horsepower or you haven’t.

Oxford和Cambridge真的不在乎你的课外活动和课外实践。在他们眼中，只有聪明的人和不聪明的人。

Oxford/Cambridge also don’t care a whit if you’re any good at mathematics if they’re considering your application to read history or English. You’re not going to be following a core curriculum across multiple academic disciplines. 

You’re going to be studying one subject and one subject only for the duration of your time there. Anything that doesn’t bear directly on your ability to succeed in that subject doesn’t matter.

如果你申请的是在历史或者英文方面深造的话，数学好不好其实一点都不重要。你不是要去学习一个需要多个学科的知识的基础课程。

你在Oxford和Cambridge的所有时间都只需用去学习一门学科。那些不影响你在那门学科能否取得成就的所有东西都不重要。

Admission to elite US universities is much more metrics-driven. Your high school GPA and standardized test scores (SATs, ACTs) count for a great deal in the admissions process. 

In the UK, the high school examination system simply doesn’t allow the same degree of filtering of the applicant pool that the US system does. Up to 30% of all A-Level exams taken earn an ‘A’ grade, so merely being predicted a string of A’s isn’t enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.

美国顶尖大学的招生更加注重硬性的指标。你的高中GPA和标准化考试成绩（SATs和ACTs）在招生流程中非常重要。

在英国，情况跟美国有很大的不同，他们的高中考试体系决定了他们不能像美国一样有效地筛选申请人。在A-level考试中，30％的学生都能拿到A等级，所以，仅仅凭借是否拿到A等级这一指标是不足以区分申请人的优劣的。

Use of an entrance exam. Due in no small part to the prior point, Oxford (for example) has historically preferred to set its own form of written examination as a means of filtering the candidate pool more tightly than A-Level (public) exam results can. 

Its approach in this regard has varied over the years; for a time, the university discontinued its use of a proprietary examination, bowing to pressure that it unduly favored applicants from privileged educational backgrounds, whose elite high schools were better able to prepare candidates to succeed on these exams. 

Over time, however, they were compelled to reintroduce a form of subject-specific proprietary examination due to the inadequacy of A-Levels in filtering down the applicant pool sufficiently.

也正是因为上面提到的那一点，以Oxford为例，Oxford一直都喜欢设置一场自己的笔试，考试结果比起A-Level（public）考试而言在筛选申请人上更加严格。

出于这方面的考虑所私设的考试有一段时间也被停止使用，因为这对那些有优势教育背景的申请人更加友好，顶尖的高中更加有能力让候选人们在这些考试中取得好成绩，这样就会带来筛选上的不公正。

然而，他们一直试图再次引入一个具有学科针对性的单独设置的考试来弥补A-Level考试在有效筛选申请人上的不足。

Legacy. US universities tend to smile on applicants whose parents also attended and give that some weight in the admissions process. It’s by no means a guarantee of admission, but it can certainly make the difference at the margins. Oxford and Cambridge do not, to my knowledge, factor this into their admissions decisions in any meaningful way.

父母的因素：美国大学欢迎申请人的父母参与到招生流程中并将其参与视为招生流程中一个同等重要的组成部分。这当然不会是被成功录取的制胜法宝，但是父母确实可以在“生死一线之际”救你于水火之中。

但是，就我所知，Oxford和Cambridge不会将父母的因素作为他们招生流程中的一个考量点。

Ivy League University:

“I see your mother is an alum. That’s great! We love to admit the children of alumni because we’ve found it helps our alumni fundraising efforts like you wouldn’t believe! In fact, we like doing this so much, we’ll bend over backwards to make it happen.”

Ivy League University：

“我发现你的母亲是我们学校的学生。那真是太好了。我们很乐意录取校友的孩子。你都不知道，这对我们向校友筹款的帮助有多大。事实上，如果可以的话，我们都会尽量录取校友的孩子。”

Oxford:

“I see your mother is an alum of this college. That’s nice. Now I’m going to ask you some really hard physics questions.”

Oxford：

“哦，你的母亲是我们大学出来的？那挺好。那现在我要问你一个非常有难度的物理问题。

The interview. Admissions interviews for Harvard and the like in the US tend to take the form of relatively cosy chats with an alumnus of the school based in the area where the applicant lives. The interviews for Oxford and Cambridge, by contrast, involve traveling in person to Oxford/Cambridge for 2 or 3 (or more) lightning rounds of fiendishly difficult interviews with a couple of hard-boiled professors in the subject to which you’ve applied. 

If you’re applying as most do, at age 17 or 18, it will likely be one of the more intense experiences you’ve gone through in life up to that point. How much so? Well, I can still vividly recall the questions I was asked in my Oxford interviews for physics…and they were 25 years ago. The interviews are probably the single most significant contributor to the overall admission decision at Oxford & Cambridge. 

The people interviewing you are the same ones who are going to see you week in, week out as an undergraduate. So they want to make absolutely sure you have the right stuff. This is why senior academics dedicate such a significant amount of their time to this aspect of the process. 

Harvard的入学面试以及其他类似的美国大学的面试通常是是跟一个与申请人来自同一片地域的校友轻轻松松地聊一下天。然而，Oxford和Cambridge的面试需要你亲自前往Oxford和Cambridge来两到三轮（甚至更多）紧凑的，地狱难度的面试，面试官还是研究你所申请的那个学科的冷酷无情的教授。

如果你跟大多数人一样，是在17或者18岁申请的，那么这将会成为你目前为止人生中最紧张的经历。有多紧张呢？emm，当初那些我在Oxford面试的时候被问到的那些物理问题我到现在还记得一清二楚……要知道，这都已经过去25年了。

这些面试或许是最最最为重要的决定你是否能被Oxford和Cambridge录取的因素。那些面试你的人会是你研究生阶段跟你朝夕相处的人。因此他们肯定要确保你有足够的能力。这就是为什么那些顶尖学者们在这个流程上要花费相当多的时间。