Here comes yet another blow to the rigour of Oxford’s entrance exams. Last December, they got rid of the in-person interview, replaced by less discerning Zoom interviews. And now the university has dropped lots of its subject-specific exams, to be replaced by more generic tests.

There will still be some tailoring to particular degrees. Humanities candidates will sit the Test of Academic Reasoning for Admissions (TARA), while maths and science applicants will take the Engineering and Science Admissions Test (ESAT) or the Test of Mathematics for University Admission (TMUA).

But those exams are still more generalised, less subject-specific than the old ones.

The aim is to help those who haven’t had the advantage of a brilliant school education – often, but not always, a private one – where you’re lucky enough to have had a deep grounding in your subject.

That’s laudable in subjects that don’t require deep grounding to proceed at top speed once you’re at university. But the truth of it is that if you’ve had a rigorous education from five till 18, then it’s near impossible for someone without that benefit to catch up in the brief three or four years of university.

By the time I got to Oxford to study classics in 1989, I’d done eight years of Latin and seven years of Greek. And that was with long school terms and long daily hours of tuition........

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