The All Souls College General Examination is Oxford’s entrance paper for Prize Fellowships, published as a PDF.
Key Takeaways
All Souls Prize Fellowship exams are among the most demanding academic assessments in the world, testing breadth across disciplines rather than narrow specialization.
The General Examination paper typically includes open-ended essay questions requiring candidates to synthesize across history, philosophy, economics, and science.
The exam is a rare public artifact of elite academic evaluation criteria, useful as a benchmark for intellectual range and writing under pressure.
Publishing past papers as PDFs gives independent learners and educators direct access to Oxford’s fellowship-level question design.