Free Tool
What to read, watch, and enter for 33 Oxbridge courses. Written by Cambridge students who applied for these subjects, not scraped from a prospectus.
Start with the official guidance
Cambridge and Oxford publish their own supercurricular guidance, and it is the safest thing to work from. Our library sits alongside these, not in place of them.
Reading is the easy half
Every applicant to Cambridge Law has read Letters to a Law Student. What separates the offers from the rejections is what you did with it: whether you can disagree with it intelligently, connect it to a case, and survive being challenged on it for twenty minutes.
Two Cambridge tutors read your draft independently, without seeing each other’s notes. They then compare, argue about where they disagree, and send you one moderated written report covering structure, argument, evidence, and what an interviewer would push on. A 30-minute call follows so you can ask why. You rewrite; the words stay yours.
How to use supercurriculars
Two sources you can argue about beat eight you can name. Admissions tutors will pick one thing from your statement and push on it for ten minutes. A long list gives them more ways to catch you out, not fewer.
Saying a book was interesting proves nothing. Saying where you think the author overreaches, and why, proves you read it critically. Tutors are looking for someone who can hold a position under pressure.
Nobody is impressed by a paid summer school. A library book, a free MOOC, an essay competition, and a Radio 4 archive cost nothing and demonstrate exactly the same thing: that you did it because you wanted to.
Working out which two sources to go deep on is the part most students get wrong. It is also the first thing we fix in a UCAS or Oxbridge package.
Questions
Next step
Paste your draft into the free clinic, then let two Cambridge tutors read what software cannot judge.