An unlikely offering cropped up in our local bookshop the other day: a volume entirely devoted to tricky questions posed in university admission interviews. It is by John Farndon – a prolific man according to his blurb but previously unknown to me – and is called “Do you think you’re clever?” which is apparently one of the questions used by sadistic interviewers at the Cambridge U Law Department. This book sheds an interesting light on what happens when obscure middle-aged men suddenly find themselves in a position of power. There are some trick questions: “How many animals did Moses take on the ark?” Answer, none – the guy with the ark was Noah. There are some impossibles: “What is fate?
Some questions are actually rather specific to a particular department. “Do you think Chairman Mao would be proud of today’s China?” was posed to Oriental Studies candidates, who might have been expected to have some idea on the matter.
As luck would have it one of my bursts of interviewing came up while I was reading the book. No doubt you will be wondering if I succumbed to the temptation to baffle a few future MA students with some variation on “Can a computer have a conscience?” or “If God is omnipotent, can he create a stone he can’t lift?”‘ Actually I was not tempted. Different people have different interviewing styles, and mine tends to the pleasant fireside chat end of the spectrum. This is no doubt partly because Hong Kong universities do not put a lot of stress on the interview and the interviewer does not have to worry that his fugitive impressions of the candidate are going to make a great deal of difference. Partly it is because I learnt a long time ago when doing a postgraduate education course that interviewing is extremely unreliable and research has disclosed that the predictions of interviewers are hopelessly unreliable. As this was the conventional wisdom 40 years ago you might think universities would have come up with something else by now. You would be wrong. Academics make a great fuss about the research they do themselves but they take no interest at all in other people’s research into their own activities. Nobody outside departments dedicated to the subject reads education research.
At the other extreme, job interviews in the journalism business are often a formality designed to preserve the fiction that the editor decides everything. In these cases the real decision has been made by the head of the relevant department and the interview is often conducted in a pub — or it was in the old days; I understand journalists do not drink so much, now.
But they will not get that sort of thing from me. Many of my colleagues regard interviewing as a chore, but I rather enjoy it. This may be because journalism attracts a lot of female students, so one tends to spend quite a lot of interview time contemplating a pleasant sight. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that one should try to make the experience as pleasant as possible for them also, although some of the people I interviewed for undergraduate purposes were clearly terrified. Sometimes they looked at me with such apprehension that I wondered if they had ever talked to a foreigner before. Sometimes — it seemed a harmless enough question — I did actually ask if this was the case. Usually, to my surprise, the kid concerned had never talked face-to-face with a foreigner before. This is a problem easily solved. I urge anyone approaching a university interview with this gap in his resume to wander down to Central, grab a foreigner and talk to it for a few minutes. We don’t eat people.