What kind of feedback are you likely to get from a university interview?

To give you an idea of the kind of feedback you could expect to receive after an interview at the University of York, assessors from the departments of Physics, Mathematics, Social Policy & Social Work, Theatre, Film, Television & Interactive Media and the Hull York Medical School have provided information on their courses in the video above.

As we have mentioned in the previous step, generally you will not receive feedback upfront but will need to request it and the feedback will likely not be extensive. The reasons for this usually are:

• The members of staff that are available to give you feedback may not be the same as those that interviewed you and will feedback based on notes taken by other colleagues.
• Institutions will receive hundreds of applications and interview as many as possible, so there is simply not enough time to give everyone feedback without it being requested or for this feedback to be in-depth.
• It is against policy for institutions to keep in-depth interview assessment notes on individuals.
• It is standard practice for the institution type, for example it is the norm for medical schools to only provide numerical feedback rather than written.

You may find that you receive a form of feedback within your university interview. Often assessors will provide prompts or ask follow up questions with the intention of getting you to explain something in more detail. These should absolutely be seen as a helpful thing, and the assessors will want to see you react positively!

We’ll talk more about how to ‘decode’ feedback and how to deal with it over the following couple of steps.

What has your experience been with feedback from university interviews so far? What kind of feedback have you received? Share your experiences with the community in the discussion below!