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The Hindu's op-ed on the All Souls College's unique entrance exam with a one-word question for an essay:
The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay.
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The unveiling of the word was once an event of such excitement that even non-applicants reportedly gathered outside the college each year, waiting for news to waft out. Applicants themselves discovered the word by flipping over a single sheet of paper and seeing it printed there, all alone, like a tiny incendiary device.
I'm disappointed to know that they are scrapping it. In an age when every institution is trying to be unique and inventing innovative ways of selecting the best among the applicants, throwing away one of your most distinguishing traits is, to say the least, rare.
Yet the death of the one-word question at the exam doesn't mean that the idea has to die with it too. How about writing a long-form blog post on a random word? You could start with Dictionary.com's Word of the Day which, coincidentally, says "Epoch" today. Will I be able to write 750words? I'll surely give it a shot.
Also, All Souls College's longer questions for essays are thought-provoking and, sometimes, peppered with odd humour:
It consists of 12 hours of essays over two days. Half are on the applicants' academic specialties, the other half on general subjects, with questions like: “Do the innocent have nothing to fear?” “Is the desire for posthumous fame irrational?” “Isn't global warming preferable to global cooling?” “How many people should there be?” and the surprisingly relevant, because this is Britain: “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?"
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