How it works
Every problem opens on a whiteboard. You can work it on your own with hints, or with the AI interviewer, and switch between them without losing your working.
The whiteboard
- An Apple Pencil writes, with pressure. Your palm is ignored while the pencil is down. A mouse or trackpad works too.
- Once you've used a pencil, one finger moves the board. Pinch to zoom. Tap with two fingers to undo.
- Draw a line and hold the pen still at the end, and it snaps straight.
- Black, blue and red pens, and an eraser.
Hints
Hints are taps, not typing, and each tap gives you a little more:
- Pick the method you're trying. The list is the same on every problem, so it never gives the answer away.
- Say how far you've got: no equation yet, stuck solving, or got an answer.
- First you're told whether the method will work, then you get a nudge, then the specific next step.
The methods on physics problems: Energy, Forces / Newton’s laws, Momentum, SUVAT / kinematics, Moments, Circular motion, Geometry / trig, Calculus, Dimensions / scaling, Symmetry.
Checking your answer
When you have an answer, pick it from a short list. The wrong options are the mistakes people actually make, and each one tells you what kind of mistake it is:
- CG
- Content gap
- MS
- Method selection
- WQ
- Wrong quantity
- SO
- Spec omission
- IE
- Incomplete enumeration
- FS
- Final-step slip
- WB
- Wrong base
- TS
- Time sink
- MR
- Misread
The AI interviewer
- You talk through the problem out loud. It listens, asks questions and gives the smallest hint that gets you moving. It never gives the answer.
- It sees your board a few seconds after you stop writing. Each line is labelled (L1, L2, …) so it can say which line it means.
- Each finished line is read and checked. If a line doesn't balance in units or isn't true for the problem, it can stop you, or leave you to find it, whichever you choose.
- It marks your board in red: it can ring, underline or tick a line, underline part of one, or write a short note like “units?”. It can't touch your own writing.
- Afterwards: a report with how much you talked, where you got stuck and which lines didn't check out, and a replay of your board with what was said.
It's run the way your university runs its interviews: Cambridge goes straight into a problem, Oxford is more like a tutorial, and Imperial starts with why you chose the course. Each runs about as long as the real one, 20 to 30 minutes. Your first is a free 10-minute taster; after that it's one credit an interview (see pricing). If an interview fails to start or drops in its first few minutes, it isn't counted.
Where the problems come from
They're written for the site, not copied from past papers, in the style of Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial interview problems. Each one is solved again separately before it goes up.