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If the examiner is any good, they'll realize that's no longer possible.
2. Is body language a language?
Definitional question. The usual vocabulary is too small for a general purpose language.
3. Are dreams more like movies or video games?
Video games. You have some agency.
4. ‘Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it can be sincere’ (W.H. AUDEN). Discuss.
The brighter animals can deceive. Ever been fooled by a crow? Can't speak to angels; never met one.
5. Should the UN pass a declaration of rights extending beyond humans?
No. They have enough problems.
6. Invent a new punctuation mark!
We have enough emoji already.
7. Is the contemporary art market a form of tulip fever?
No, it's a form of status signalling. A lek.
8. When did the beautiful become the good?
Some time before Plato.
9. Should Job Centres offer opportunities for sex work?
Absent coercion, yes.
10. Are all asylum seekers equal?
Some are more equal than others.
All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44893522 - Aug 2025 (41 comments)
2024 general essay questions for Oxford 'All Souls' scholarship [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42793802 - Jan 2025 (15 comments)
Sample Questions from the All Souls Examination at Oxford - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346984 - Oct 2015 (5 comments)
I'm answering questions from the 'hardest exam in the world' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3971737 - May 2012 (38 comments)
All Souls College discontinues its tradition of the dreaded one word essay exam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385810 - May 2010 (1 comment)
All Souls: The toughest test you’ll ever take - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442852 - Jan 2009 (16 comments)
Cough cough
> It was the only time since the American Revolutionary War that a foreign power had captured and occupied a United States capital. [Burning of Washington]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington
Still technically correct :)
But I don’t actually know how All Souls selects for applicants – are there examples of people who argued against the prevailing opinions and still got accepted?
The rubric doesn't say, but I'm guessing you'd get three hours per essay, one hour per question, minus the minutes spent selecting which ones.
My guess is no, it wouldn’t. These questions all have pretty strong assumptions behind them, and so my guess is that they’re looking for people who fundamentally have the same opinions but are capable of communicating them well. And not someone that has different opinions, even if they communicate them well.
They're looking for a certain type of person, but we can't figure out who that is from the questions. We could probably do some cold reading just from knowing that it'll be a bunch of academics doing the assessing and they do tend to see the world in a certain way but there isn't anything to glean from the paper.
TL;DR: It's one of the papers you need to sit to become an Oxford All Souls Fellow.
What is lost when you put any of these in an LLM?
Yes, we can get plausible sounding answers generated algorithmically. But these are great starting points for humans to develop their own thinking.
My university, LSE, asked all students to write exam essays by hand ~10 years ago. Wonder how it is done at Oxford today.
I'd like to think this is a self-aware critique of filters just like this, ostensibly designed to keep those icky non-leftists out of academia.
I wanted to do a tour of the All Souls College last year but it was closed, unfortunately, on the day I walked by; I was only there for a two day conference and had to leave early the next morning.
The examiners are, I imagine, quite good at the close reading of essays which this sort of question produces. That ought to address your second point.
This entire comment has exactly 4145 characters.
2. Is body language a language?
Yes, obviously.
3. Are dreams more like movies or video games?
Video games. We have autonomy to interact with their content.
4. ‘Only animals who are below civilization and the angels who are beyond it can be sincere’ (W.H. AUDEN). Discuss.
Animals have no ability to lie. Angels have no need to lie. Civilization is irrelevant.
5. Should the UN pass a declaration of rights extending beyond humans?
The UN struggles enough to get human rights recognized, let alone animals, aliens, or AI.
6. Invent a new punctuation mark!
The mark {insert mark here} can be used to distinguish the use of restrictive vs. non-restrictive descriptors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictiveness). It will stop many arguments before they begin. Or not.
7. Is the contemporary art market a form of tulip fever?
No. While overpriced fine art can be a speculative asset, it is more commonly a vehicle for money laundering, tax evasion, or wealth storage.
8. When did the beautiful become the good?
It hasn't. But beautiful bad things can appeal to us because beautiful is, by definition, appealing.
9. Should Job Centres offer opportunities for sex work?
Yes. But the world isn't remotely ready for that on multiple levels, so don't bother.
10. Are all asylum seekers equal?
All humans are equal in a moral sense. No two humans are equal by identity. All applications for asylum are not equally valid.
11. Write a dialogue between Socrates and Elon Musk.
No.
12. In a multimedia age, what is the point of zoos?
So people can see animals in person.
13. The organ has been considered the king of instruments. Is it?
Any claim to the preeminence of any one instrument is a value judgment biased primarily by classist baggage attached to the arts. Doubly so if the instrument in question is a staple of either Western canon or church music.
14. What is the difference between an ideology and a religion?
Religion has existed longer than we have cared to define it, so religion is whatever people agree it is, but broadly, religion appeals to a supernatural basis for beliefs in fundamental tenets of how life should be lived.
15. Does a pope matter?
Yes. The pope plays a central role in Catholicism.
16. ‘Mercy has a human face’ (WILLIAM BLAKE). Do you agree?
We can and must learn to embody human virtues intellectually and deliberately rather than emotionally and instinctively. Such is the only hope for our species in an increasingly transhuman (or perhaps just inhuman) future.
17. Can philosophy help someone who is facing death?
Yes. This is the most likely explanation for the popularity of beliefs about the afterlife.
18. Why are most intellectuals left-wing?
Let's say I don't know.
19. What do we owe our parents?
Depends on the culture. Broadly, what both parent and child have implicitly or explicitly agreed upon the time of their separation.
20. Is one’s life more than the sum of one’s days?
No.
21. Has photography deepened empathy ‘regarding the pain of others’ (SUSAN SONTAG)?
Yes. As a single example, war journalism might as well have not existed prior to the invention of photography.
22. Can there be freedom without rules?
There is unbounded negative freedom but very little positive freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty
23. ‘Humans are only fully human beings when they play’ (FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER). Discuss.
Humans get bored easily, likely on account of their sophisticated information processing capabilities and rich interiority, both deriving from their complex brains.
24. ‘Different verbal communities generate different kinds and amounts of consciousness or awareness’ (B.F. SKINNER). Do they?
In some spooky panpsychist sense, of course not. In the sense that all culture acts as a thick lens for individual sensitivities, of course.
25. Should virtue signalling be encouraged?
NO
26. Defend ghosting.
27. What is regret good for?
Learning from past mistakes.