After you submit your primary application to the AMCAS, you have a little bit of time before you start receiving your secondaries. You might think…yay I have a month off before I have to do anything! That’s sort of true, but there are several medical schools that require you to take ethics exams. In my case, I had schools on my list that required both CASPer and PREview. If you are also applying to schools that require these exams, June is a great time to take them while you’re still waiting to receive secondaries.
These are exams that are meant to share a more interpersonal aspect of your personality with medical schools. In other words, it’s just another thing you have to prepare for and pay money for in the application cycle. The good news is that these exams aren’t meant to be “hard” and you don’t really need that much preparation time.
Before signing up, make sure you’re actually applying to schools that need these exam scores!
CASPer or Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal Characteristics is offered through a third party called Acuity Insights. They offer the exam about once a month (so ensure that you sign up on time so you get the date that you want). The exam is about 90-110 minutes and involves 14 scenarios in all.
In part 1, you do the video based responses. You watch 4 video based scenarios and read 2 text based scenarios in this section. For each of these scenarios, you receive 2 questions and have to record a one minute video response for each.
In part 2, you do the typed responses. You will watch 5 video based scenarios and read 3 text based scenarios in this section. For each of these scenarios, you receive 3 questions and have 5 minutes to type out responses to ALL three questions.
The best way to prepare for it is to look for practice questions online and then answer them. Acuity Insights does offer a practice test that you should use to familiarize yourself with the format and the types of questions asked. There are third party resources and courses, but in my opinion just looking through sample questions, answering them, and then comparing them to the “correct” answers is more than enough.
For your score you are given a number between 1-4 (and you should aim for a 3 or a 4). These correspond with:
1: 0-24th percentile
2: 25-49th percentile (better than 25% of test takers)
3: 50-74th percentile (better than 50% of test-takers
4: 75-100th percentile (better than 75% of test-takers)
Overall don’t be too stressed about this exam! It’s definitely not a huge factor in your overall admissions profile (I know someone who got a 1 and still ended up getting into a great MD school).
The PREview exam is offered through AAMC unlike the CASPer exam. The actual exam time is about 75 minutes (but this doesn’t count the check in and check out time). In this exam, you are given multiple hypothetical situations or dilemmas. For each dilemma, you are then given several responses and for each response you have to choose how effective it will be between “Very effective,” “Effective,” “Ineffective,” and “Very Ineffective.”
The PREview Exam was harder for me than Casper because sometimes the distinction between “Very effective”/ “Effective” and “Very ineffective”/ “Ineffective” was harder to decipher than just speaking about how I would handle a situation. I prepared for this by looking for online questions and then eventually when I did enough questions, I realized there was a certain kind of answer that they would mark as “Very Effective” instead of “Effective” and also “Very Ineffective” versus “Ineffective.”
I spent about a week studying for this exam (about an hour each day) and ended up getting a 9 (the scoring is on a scale from 1-9 though the percentile varies from year to year). Don’t stress out too much for this exam, but definitely give yourself enough time to work through practice questions (mostly so you’re not nervous on exam day).
Overall…both these exams are annoying, but not meant to be super stressful or difficult!