Skip to main content
Menu

Kavita Singh PPE Essay Competition

The Principal and Fellows of St Hugh’s College are pleased to be offering a prize, worth up to £500, for the best essays submitted by a pupil who, at the closing date, has been in the Sixth Form of a state-funded school or college for a period of not more than two years. Candidates are required to write an essay in response to one of these three questions:

Philosophy

Suppose technology advanced to such an extent that brain transplants became possible and someone else’s brain was implanted into your body, while yours was implanted into theirs. Would you emerge from this process with a new brain, or with a new body? Or would neither of these descriptions of the situation be correct?

Politics

Can we design democratic institutions that take into account the full preferences of the majority and where group decision-making is stable and where the process satisfies minimal conditions of fairness?

Economics

Recent years have seen an active public debate on the merits and costs of wealth taxes. What problems (if any) could a wealth tax solve and what are the expected economic costs of such a tax?

Entries should be 2,000 – 4,000 words in length, and are to be submitted as a Microsoft Word document, together with the Kavita Singh Prize cover sheet, through the online form on this page.

The closing date for entries is 5pm (GMT) on Friday 28th July 2023.

Prize winners will be announced online by the end of September.

Please direct any enquiries to outreach@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk

Students entering this competition might be interested in the following undergraduate courses offered at St Hugh’s College: PPE, History and Politics, Philosophy and Modern Languages, PPL (Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics), Economics and Management, Computer Science and Philosophy, Mathematics and Philosophy.

Poster 2023

Cover Sheet

Kavita Singh Submissions Form

Please use this form to upload your submission for the Kavita Singh Competition. Please do not forget to upload the Cover Sheet with your submission.

  • I declare that this essay is my own work and give permission for the judging panel to use licensed electronic software to examine my work for plagiarism should they wish to do so.
  • I confirm that I attend a state-funded school or institution.
  • Drop files here or
    Accepted file types: docx, doc, pdf, docx, doc, pdf, docx, doc, pdf, docx, doc, pdf, Max. file size: 128 MB.
      Please upload an electronic copy of your Essay, together with the completed Cover Sheet, in Word format. Please note that Essays should be no more than 4000 words in length.