Hello, my name is Simon Kemp. I'm the Director of Admissions for the Modern Languages Faculty and I'm here to tell you about the Modern Languages Admissions Test or MLAT. 

So you'll be asked to take either two, one or sometimes no sections at all of our MLAT test, depending on which degree combination you're applying to study. The MLAT consists of a menu of ten different tests, eight tests for languages you might be studying at A-level: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Portuguese and Modern Greek; and then two further tests: The Language Aptitude Test or LAT, which is just for people applying to study courses with single honours Russian, Beginners' Russian or courses with Polish; and the Philosophy Test, which is just for people applying to study Philosophy and Modern Languages. 

So you can see on our admissions pages, the particular degree course that you're applying to study, which sections of the MLAT we’ll be asking you to take. Briefly, if you're studying something in the sixth form we’ll be asking you to take a test in it. If you're applying to study something as a beginners' language, we won't be asking you to take a test in it. 

The test itself you can find on our admissions pages. We have a mock up of the Pearson test that you can play with to get a good sense of what the format is. When you have a go at it, you will be asked to choose which test or tests you would like to take. When you do the real thing, the Pearson system will know which degree course you've applied for and which tests are appropriate and will just serve you up the correct tests for your course. 

When you start the test you'll see it's in two sections. In the first section, there are twenty multiple choice questions. You'll be given a target language sentence with a gap in it, and you'll be asked to choose the correct one out of four options, to fill the gap in the sentence. The second part of the test, has ten questions where you'll be asked to translate sentences from the target language into English. The first set of questions are marked, two marks each right or wrong. 

The second set of questions are given six marks each. In those cases, they're marked by a human marker who can see the various alternatives that will be correct, and also how many marks to give for answers that are partially correct. 

The one test that works a little differently is the Language Aptitude Test, which as I said, is only for people applying to study Russian single honours, Beginners' Russian courses and courses with Polish and everyone else does not need to worry about it. When you have a look at that test, you'll see that it's asking questions about a made up language. So somebody has invented a language for it, they've given you a set of sentences in that language and their English translation and then using that, they're asking you to try to code break the language to decipher how it works and to translate further sentences from the language into English and also to create sentences in the made up language. So, for example, the test might give you the made up languages version of ‘the dogs chase a cat’, then it would ask you to translate ‘the cat chases a dog’ from English into the made up language. 

The final question type to look out for on the Language Aptitude Test is a brief essay question in English of about 250 words about the experience of language learning. This is very much a standard academic question. You're asked to give an answer in the form of an academic essay. I recommend that you try to do these past papers on the website for practice. 

So for all of the tests, whether you're doing a language that you've studied before or the Language Aptitude Test or the Philosophy Test, the way the questions are scored means that there's no penalty for a wrong answer. So in the multiple choice and in the translation questions a wrong question will get the same score as a question left blank, which means you've got no reason not to do any of the questions, even if it just comes down to a guess, it's always better to have a go than to leave it blank. 

And lastly, the very best preparation you can make is to explore on our admissions pages the mock up Pearson test, which will let you know exactly how the test is going to work on the day, but also the archive of tests from past years, which have a slightly different format (they're not based in multiple choice) - but those will give you a very good idea of the kinds of questions that you'll be asked. 

Good luck with your test.