The short answer: the most common private school interview questions are versions of one question: who are you? They arrive in four clusters. Get-to-know-you, school and learning, interests, and thinking on your feet, and none of them has a wrong answer, only borrowed ones. Below are the fifteen your child is most likely to meet, with the pattern for reading any of them. The full question-by-question decode is in the free guide.
What questions do private schools ask in an interview?
The shape first, because once you see it no question on this list can ambush you. Interviews everywhere follow the same arc. Get-to-know-you and background, then school experience, then interests, then your child's own questions, and interviewers pull from the same pool everywhere because the pool works: low-stakes doors into a kid's real life. There is no material to study. The questions are only about who your child already is.
What are the 15 most common interview questions?
The fifteen. Get to know you: tell me about yourself · what's something you're good at? · what's hard for you. Something you're working on? · tell me about your friends · is there anything else you'd like me to know about you? School and learning: why do you want to come to this school? · what do you like about your current school? · what's your favorite subject, and your least favorite? Interests: what do you like to do for fun? · tell me about a book you've read · if you could change one thing about the world, what would it be? Thinking on their feet: tell me about a time you tried something hard · what would you do if…? · how do you handle it when you're frustrated or upset? And the child's turn: what's a question you have for me?
How do you answer them without sounding coached?
The decode pattern, with three worked examples. Every question on the list is listening for something simpler than it sounds, and the small true answer beats the impressive one. "Tell me about yourself" isn't a résumé prompt. A few true sentences about what your child likes beat a list of activities, and it has its own full piece on this blog. "What do you like to do for fun?" is the lighting-up question: the spark is the asset and the subject almost doesn't matter. With one exception: "I play video games" is not what a school wants to hear, and if gaming is the biggest passion, help your child reach for the next true thing on their list. And "what's a question you have for me?" is one of the strongest signals in the whole conversation. "what do kids do at lunch?" outshines a perfect answer, because genuine curiosity can't be faked.
Now the warning that comes with any list like this: don't march through it. Fifteen rehearsed answers is over-coaching in miniature: a child listening for cues instead of questions, and collapsing on the first follow-up. The right use of this list is parent literacy: you read the decode, you understand what each question is listening for, and practice stays small. A few questions a session, rotating, conversational, done while it's still comfortable. Prepared, not rehearsed, at list scale.
Each of the fifteen above has a full decode: what it's really asking, what a true answer sounds like, and the prep mistake to skip. That's the free guide, "What They're Really Asking," and it's the complete version of this article. One last thing before you download anything: your child already knows every answer on this list, because the questions are only about who they are. The guide's job, and this site's, is helping them believe it.
Jennifer Hines spent twenty years as a Dean of Admission at Noble and Greenough School. Her free guide, What They're Really Asking, decodes fifteen interview questions from the other side of the table, and shows why the quiet kid is often the one who lands them best.