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

dnnddidiej

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

wocka

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

spoonyvoid7

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.

f_allwein

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.

DiscourseFan

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.

dang

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

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

roncesvalles

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

keiferski

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?

xsist10

> 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