Free Interview Resources
Free practice questions, preparation advice, and expert insights for History and Modern Languages interviews at Cambridge.
Real History and Modern Languages interview questions in the style Cambridge asks. Try answering each one aloud before you reveal the hint.
Look at this short primary source. What is the first thing you would want to know before using it as historical evidence?
Close-Reading & Passage Analysis
Read this passage in your chosen language. Which words or phrases are doing the most interpretive work, and why?
Close-Reading & Passage Analysis
A source claims to describe a popular uprising. What clues would help you judge whether it is really a popular voice or an elite account of the crowd?
Close-Reading & Passage Analysis
If you were given a political pamphlet from the eighteenth century, how would you distinguish persuasion from description?
Close-Reading & Passage Analysis
Translate the central idea of this passage into English, then explain what is lost or changed in your translation.
Close-Reading & Passage Analysis
Supervision-style interviews with problem-solving and academic discussion, often with two interviewers.
Cambridge interviews usually happen at your first-choice college. Most applicants have two interviews, with some subjects requiring a third at the pooled college. Cambridge interviews tend to involve two interviewers and may include a written assessment or pre-interview task sent on the day.
Interview Invitation
Late Nov
Arrival to Interview
Early Dec
Technical Question
Mid Dec
Decision
Early Jan
Interview Invitation
Late Nov
Arrival to Interview
Early Dec
Technical Question
Mid Dec
Decision
Early Jan
What can the silences in this source tell us, and where do we risk over-reading them?
Is history closer to an art, a science or a form of argument?
Can historians ever be objective, or is objectivity the wrong standard to use?
Was the Reformation primarily a religious transformation, a political struggle or a social process?
What makes a revolution different from a rebellion, a coup or a reform movement?
Does literature give historians evidence about society, or does it mainly tell us about literary convention?
What is lost when a historical event is described through national categories rather than linguistic, regional or imperial ones?
What evidence would you need to decide whether a language policy changed everyday behaviour or only official paperwork?
How could you study the beliefs of people who left few written records of their own?
If two contemporary sources disagree about the same event, how would you decide whether either is more reliable?
What kinds of evidence could help you reconstruct the experience of migration across a language border?
How might European history look different if printing had spread two centuries earlier?
If a major empire had adopted a single official language much earlier, what might and might not have changed?
You mention a historian in your personal statement. What is their central argument, and where would you challenge it?
Which text in your target language has changed the way you think about a historical period?
Why do you want to study history and a modern language together rather than as separate interests?
Which piece of submitted written work would you most want to revise now, and what would you change?
Should historians make moral judgements about people in the past?
Who has the right to translate, preserve or interpret another community's cultural memory?
16+ weeks
8-12 weeks
4-6 weeks
1-2 weeks
the week of
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Book Mock Interview →Watch & Learn
Useful for understanding course structure and expectations.
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Further Reading
by University of Cambridge Faculty of History
Useful practice for analysing unseen historical sources.
by University of Cambridge
Confirms the current HML language assessment format and College-specific notes.
by University of Cambridge
Explains how to prepare using personal statement, written work, wider reading and practice interviews.
by University of Cambridge
Gives broader information about language areas, research and course culture.
by University of Cambridge
Useful for understanding the scope of Cambridge history teaching and research.