alexanderhthompson.substack.com/p/exam-of-the-month-all-souls-prize

All Souls College’s current official Further Particulars for the 2026 Examination Fellowships do not list a £16,000 annual stipend.

Instead, they state that during the first two years Examination Fellows receive a scholarship stipend of £21,000 per annum plus either free accommodation or a housing allowance. After that, the financial arrangements change: Fellows continuing with an Oxford DPhil receive a substantially higher stipend, while Fellows taking up an academic or non-academic appointment elsewhere receive a different, much smaller stipend.

So the article’s claim that the fellowship comes with “a yearly stipend of £16,000” is inaccurate both because the current amount is not £16,000 and because the fellowship does not have one single flat annual stipend across all seven years.

This sentence is inaccurate in two ways.

1. Applicants are not just “Oxford graduates.” All Souls’ official eligibility page says the fellowship is open to people who either completed their first degree at Oxford or are currently registered as a graduate student at Oxford. It also says candidates may have completed their first BA or equivalent degree “at the University of Oxford or elsewhere.” So the pool includes some current Oxford graduate students whose first degree was not from Oxford.

2. The annual total is not consistently “around 150.” Official equality reports published by All Souls show substantial variation in recent years. For Examination Fellowships, the College reports 85 applications in 2017, 84 in 2018, 107 in 2019, 265 in 2021, and 271 in 2022. In a later report tracking candidates who completed the exam, the College reports 145 in 2021, 178 in 2022, and 123 in 2023. Those official figures do not support the blanket claim that every year brings roughly 150 applicants.

Because both the composition of the pool and the numbers are misstated, the sentence is misleading as written.