The 2025 All Souls General Examination paper for Oxford Fellowship candidates features open-ended essay prompts across philosophy, political history, and AI.
Key Takeaways
Includes a Turing test inversion prompt: write an essay convincing a judge you are the human, not the machine.
Definitional edge-case questions: “Is body language a language?” and “Are dreams more like movies or video games?”
Political culture question asks whether the US lack of foreign occupation explains its political character.
Paper is the written component for All Souls Fellowship selection, one of Oxford’s most selective academic posts with no coursework or teaching duties.
Hacker News Comment Review
UK vs US university culture gap: UK-educated commenters emphasized All Souls prizes novel, well-argued positions over correct answers; several HN readers assumed questions implied expected ideological conclusions.
The foreign occupation question has a documented factual hole: the 1814 Burning of Washington was a foreign capture of the US capital, directly undermining the question’s premise.
The Turing test prompt generated quick-take answers; emerging consensus is that a skilled examiner can no longer reliably distinguish a strong AI essay from a human one.
Notable Comments
@roncesvalles: “any sentence that would get you banned from most social media” – sharp read on what question 1 is actually testing about speech and social limits.
