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?
I'm from a Cambridge background, not Oxford, but the trick to this sort of essay is that the journey is the destination. That is, ultimately it's not expecting you to reach a single right conclusion, but to present evidence, argument, and references.
The rubric doesn't say, but I'm guessing you'd get three hours per essay, one hour per question, minus the minutes spent selecting which ones.
Of course, but I am wondering if you wrote a brilliant essay arguing for a viewpoint that seems to go against the one underlying the selection of questions here, would it matter?
My guess is no, it wouldn’t. These questions all have pretty strong assumptions behind them, and so my guess is that they’re looking for people who fundamentally have the same opinions but are capable of communicating them well. And not someone that has different opinions, even if they communicate them well.
I don't know, but many of them have a triggering smell, which must be on purpose. A polarizing prompt might show you what somebody thinks, but it is also likely to show you whether they think at all. I'm reminded of "This I Believe" on NPR. The subject is what a person believes, not what they don't believe.
> 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]
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.
I'm not sure I agree. They're just essay prompts. One could write a bad essay that takes itself too seriously given the prompts, but one could also write a powerful essay starting from any of these prompts. I don't really see where you get the conclusion that students matriculating from these places have recently begun to be smoke-blowers that while possessing detailed knowledge of various arcana fail to produce anything useful.
It’s not about highly specific knowledge: none of these questions are justifiable for a graduate level program, they are better served as prompts for essays that Americans write in their college applications. With these questions you are not going to be engaging with anything particularly deep, but you may produce something that sounds deep. But sounding deep and having actual depth are very different things, and the latter can often look very boring or painstaking, whereas the former always appears profound—and it seems like all of these questions are meant to help the student produce something “profound,” not necessarily something thoughtful or difficult.
I think the prompts being "easy" in this way is sort of the point. An applicant can demonstrate their mastery of language and the topics they select, producing an essay that goes far beyond the obvious leading direction (which most of the questions have).
The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.
Oxford and its equivalent universities around the world (Harvard, Yale, and so on) are not really selecting for radically brilliant views on social or philosophical issues. At the end of the day, it's an institution training elites for business/government/etc. not a fund for intellectual brilliance.
1. In the essay version of the Turing test, an examiner decides which of two
essays was written by a human and which by a machine. Convince the
examiner that you are the human.
This entire comment has exactly 4145 characters.
2. Is body language a language?
Yes, obviously.
3. Are dreams more like movies or video games?
Video games. We have autonomy to interact with their content.
4. ‘Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it
can be sincere’ (W.H. AUDEN). Discuss.
Animals have no ability to lie. Angels have no need to lie. Civilization is irrelevant.
5. Should the UN pass a declaration of rights extending beyond humans?
The UN struggles enough to get human rights recognized, let alone animals, aliens, or AI.
6. Invent a new punctuation mark!
The mark {insert mark here} can be used to distinguish the use of restrictive vs. non-restrictive descriptors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictiveness). It will stop many arguments before they begin. Or not.
7. Is the contemporary art market a form of tulip fever?
No. While overpriced fine art can be a speculative asset, it is more commonly a vehicle for money laundering, tax evasion, or wealth storage.
8. When did the beautiful become the good?
It hasn't. But beautiful bad things can appeal to us because beautiful is, by definition, appealing.
9. Should Job Centres offer opportunities for sex work?
Yes. But the world isn't remotely ready for that on multiple levels, so don't bother.
10. Are all asylum seekers equal?
All humans are equal in a moral sense. No two humans are equal by identity. All applications for asylum are not equally valid.
11. Write a dialogue between Socrates and Elon Musk.
No.
12. In a multimedia age, what is the point of zoos?
So people can see animals in person.
13. The organ has been considered the king of instruments. Is it?
Any claim to the preeminence of any one instrument is a value judgment biased primarily by classist baggage attached to the arts. Doubly so if the instrument in question is a staple of either Western canon or church music.
14. What is the difference between an ideology and a religion?
Religion has existed longer than we have cared to define it, so religion is whatever people agree it is, but broadly, religion appeals to a supernatural basis for beliefs in fundamental tenets of how life should be lived.
15. Does a pope matter?
Yes. The pope plays a central role in Catholicism.
16. ‘Mercy has a human face’ (WILLIAM BLAKE). Do you agree?
We can and must learn to embody human virtues intellectually and deliberately rather than emotionally and instinctively. Such is the only hope for our species in an increasingly transhuman (or perhaps just inhuman) future.
17. Can philosophy help someone who is facing death?
Yes. This is the most likely explanation for the popularity of beliefs about the afterlife.
18. Why are most intellectuals left-wing?
Let's say I don't know.
19. What do we owe our parents?
Depends on the culture. Broadly, what both parent and child have implicitly or explicitly agreed upon the time of their separation.
20. Is one’s life more than the sum of one’s days?
No.
21. Has photography deepened empathy ‘regarding the pain of others’ (SUSAN
SONTAG)?
Yes. As a single example, war journalism might as well have not existed prior to the invention of photography.
22. Can there be freedom without rules?
There is unbounded negative freedom but very little positive freedom.
23. ‘Humans are only fully human beings when they play’ (FRIEDRICH VON
SCHILLER). Discuss.
Humans get bored easily, likely on account of their sophisticated information processing capabilities and rich interiority, both deriving from their complex brains.
24. ‘Different verbal communities generate different kinds and amounts of
consciousness or awareness’ (B.F. SKINNER). Do they?
In some spooky panpsychist sense, of course not. In the sense that all culture acts as a thick lens for individual sensitivities, of course.
Did the British forget about 1812? Cos we will never.
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)
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?
I'm from a Cambridge background, not Oxford, but the trick to this sort of essay is that the journey is the destination. That is, ultimately it's not expecting you to reach a single right conclusion, but to present evidence, argument, and references.
The rubric doesn't say, but I'm guessing you'd get three hours per essay, one hour per question, minus the minutes spent selecting which ones.
Of course, but I am wondering if you wrote a brilliant essay arguing for a viewpoint that seems to go against the one underlying the selection of questions here, would it matter?
My guess is no, it wouldn’t. These questions all have pretty strong assumptions behind them, and so my guess is that they’re looking for people who fundamentally have the same opinions but are capable of communicating them well. And not someone that has different opinions, even if they communicate them well.
I don't know, but many of them have a triggering smell, which must be on purpose. A polarizing prompt might show you what somebody thinks, but it is also likely to show you whether they think at all. I'm reminded of "This I Believe" on NPR. The subject is what a person believes, not what they don't believe.
> 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
> The British occupation of Washington, D.C., lasted for roughly 26 hours.
Still technically correct :)
For all its prestige, these read like Reddit AMA topics.
Hook me up with the password for the alternate dimension Reddit you visit, it is so much smarter than mine.
The value is in the answers.
The "real" answer to the first question is simple: any sentence that would get you banned from most social media.
ἡμεῖς πάντες οὐδὲν ἀλλ' ἢ κόνις ἐν ἀνέμῳ. Oh, I don’t speak Greek.
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.
A good comparison by American standards would be the UChicago admissions essay prompt.
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.
Still by hand.
>Why are most intellectuals left-wing?
I'd like to think this is a self-aware critique of filters just like this, ostensibly designed to keep those icky non-leftists out of academia.
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.
I'm not sure I agree. They're just essay prompts. One could write a bad essay that takes itself too seriously given the prompts, but one could also write a powerful essay starting from any of these prompts. I don't really see where you get the conclusion that students matriculating from these places have recently begun to be smoke-blowers that while possessing detailed knowledge of various arcana fail to produce anything useful.
It’s not about highly specific knowledge: none of these questions are justifiable for a graduate level program, they are better served as prompts for essays that Americans write in their college applications. With these questions you are not going to be engaging with anything particularly deep, but you may produce something that sounds deep. But sounding deep and having actual depth are very different things, and the latter can often look very boring or painstaking, whereas the former always appears profound—and it seems like all of these questions are meant to help the student produce something “profound,” not necessarily something thoughtful or difficult.
I think the prompts being "easy" in this way is sort of the point. An applicant can demonstrate their mastery of language and the topics they select, producing an essay that goes far beyond the obvious leading direction (which most of the questions have).
The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.
https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/people/245 perhaps you can take a look and decide?
Oxford and its equivalent universities around the world (Harvard, Yale, and so on) are not really selecting for radically brilliant views on social or philosophical issues. At the end of the day, it's an institution training elites for business/government/etc. not a fund for intellectual brilliance.
To all the yes/no questions the answer is yes.
1. In the essay version of the Turing test, an examiner decides which of two essays was written by a human and which by a machine. Convince the examiner that you are the human.
This entire comment has exactly 4145 characters.
2. Is body language a language?
Yes, obviously.
3. Are dreams more like movies or video games?
Video games. We have autonomy to interact with their content.
4. ‘Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it can be sincere’ (W.H. AUDEN). Discuss.
Animals have no ability to lie. Angels have no need to lie. Civilization is irrelevant.
5. Should the UN pass a declaration of rights extending beyond humans?
The UN struggles enough to get human rights recognized, let alone animals, aliens, or AI.
6. Invent a new punctuation mark!
The mark {insert mark here} can be used to distinguish the use of restrictive vs. non-restrictive descriptors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictiveness). It will stop many arguments before they begin. Or not.
7. Is the contemporary art market a form of tulip fever?
No. While overpriced fine art can be a speculative asset, it is more commonly a vehicle for money laundering, tax evasion, or wealth storage.
8. When did the beautiful become the good?
It hasn't. But beautiful bad things can appeal to us because beautiful is, by definition, appealing.
9. Should Job Centres offer opportunities for sex work?
Yes. But the world isn't remotely ready for that on multiple levels, so don't bother.
10. Are all asylum seekers equal?
All humans are equal in a moral sense. No two humans are equal by identity. All applications for asylum are not equally valid.
11. Write a dialogue between Socrates and Elon Musk.
No.
12. In a multimedia age, what is the point of zoos?
So people can see animals in person.
13. The organ has been considered the king of instruments. Is it?
Any claim to the preeminence of any one instrument is a value judgment biased primarily by classist baggage attached to the arts. Doubly so if the instrument in question is a staple of either Western canon or church music.
14. What is the difference between an ideology and a religion?
Religion has existed longer than we have cared to define it, so religion is whatever people agree it is, but broadly, religion appeals to a supernatural basis for beliefs in fundamental tenets of how life should be lived.
15. Does a pope matter?
Yes. The pope plays a central role in Catholicism.
16. ‘Mercy has a human face’ (WILLIAM BLAKE). Do you agree?
We can and must learn to embody human virtues intellectually and deliberately rather than emotionally and instinctively. Such is the only hope for our species in an increasingly transhuman (or perhaps just inhuman) future.
17. Can philosophy help someone who is facing death?
Yes. This is the most likely explanation for the popularity of beliefs about the afterlife.
18. Why are most intellectuals left-wing?
Let's say I don't know.
19. What do we owe our parents?
Depends on the culture. Broadly, what both parent and child have implicitly or explicitly agreed upon the time of their separation.
20. Is one’s life more than the sum of one’s days?
No.
21. Has photography deepened empathy ‘regarding the pain of others’ (SUSAN SONTAG)?
Yes. As a single example, war journalism might as well have not existed prior to the invention of photography.
22. Can there be freedom without rules?
There is unbounded negative freedom but very little positive freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty
23. ‘Humans are only fully human beings when they play’ (FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER). Discuss.
Humans get bored easily, likely on account of their sophisticated information processing capabilities and rich interiority, both deriving from their complex brains.
24. ‘Different verbal communities generate different kinds and amounts of consciousness or awareness’ (B.F. SKINNER). Do they?
In some spooky panpsychist sense, of course not. In the sense that all culture acts as a thick lens for individual sensitivities, of course.
25. Should virtue signalling be encouraged?
NO
26. Defend ghosting.
27. What is regret good for?
Learning from past mistakes.
(2025)