Teach or write with me

The two kinds of work

What the work needs

Four things, and they are all about what you can do rather than where you have been.

• Real depth in at least one subject. Mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, comfortably past the level the paper tests, because a question written at the edge of your own understanding shows.
• Direct experience of a demanding admissions process, either sat or taught. It does not have to be this one.
• The habit of deriving an answer rather than recognising it. In practice: given a question you did not write, you can work it out from the statement alone, and then say why somebody would pick each of the other options.
• Willingness to have your work checked and sometimes turned down. Every question goes through the same gate and a meaningful share do not pass it. Nothing about that is personal, and if it would grate, this is not enjoyable work.

Where you studied is not a criterion

It is worth saying this plainly rather than leaving it to be inferred, because admissions work has an obvious way of going wrong here.

The ESAT is sat for Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford and UCL. So the people who have been through this particular process, and who therefore think of themselves as qualified to help with it, are drawn from a narrow pool. That is a fact about who tends to write to me. It is not a requirement, it is not what I select on, and treating it as a proxy for ability would be both unfair and a bad way to find good questions.

What the work needs is in the four points above. A person who can write one question properly and defend every option in it is useful to this work whatever is on their degree certificate, and a person who cannot is not, whatever is on theirs.

One related thing, since it comes up. The ESAT was first sat in October 2024, so almost nobody has sat the ESAT itself. Anyone who took an admissions test for engineering before that sat the ENGAA, the NSAA or the PAT. Experience of those is relevant and I would rather you described what you actually took than stretched it.

How what you write would be checked

Worth knowing in advance, because it sets what the work feels like and it is stricter than most people expect.

• The answer is re-derived, not confirmed. Software built for this works the question out again from the statement alone, without being told the intended answer, and has to arrive at the same one.
• It confirms no second option is also correct. This catches more problems than anything else, and it is the check people are most surprised by.
• Every wrong option has to be reachable. Each one names the mistake that leads a candidate to it, and an option nobody would pick is a wasted option.
• Then a person reads it. Computation settles whether the mathematics is right. Whether the question is worth asking is a judgement, and it is made by reading.

The same standard applies to everything on this site, including the questions I write myself. How it works in more detail is on the quality assurance page, and the material it produces is free to read on the ESAT library before you decide whether you want any part of it.

Getting in touch

There is no form and no application window. An email saying which of the two kinds of work interests you, what you would teach or write, and where your subject depth is, tells me more than a CV does.

If you would like to show rather than describe, the most useful thing you can send is one question you have written, with its worked solution and a line on each wrong option saying which mistake leads there. That is the actual job, and one good example settles it faster than anything else.

If you represent a school, a university or a company rather than yourself, the collaboration page is the right one: it covers workshops, technical review and research partnerships.