Casper season is up and running, so today I want to give you four things that you absolutely must do in completing your Casper test. Before I get into that, hi, my name is Dr. Sarah Klieb, and I'm an admissions expert at BMO. If you'd like our help preparing for your Casper test, simply go to bmocasper.com, and we'll get you started on your preparations with one of our admissions experts. Now, on to those Casper tips. So... Some things that you absolutely have to do on the Casper Test. I have four tips that I want to give you for in the Casper Test. I'm also going to give you a sort of bonus tip, but it's one that should hopefully go without saying if you've been following the advice that we give you. So I'll give you that one first because it's sort of outside or before the Casper Test. The first thing that you have to do that you always have to do before the Casper Test is time yourself with practice ahead of time. Fear of the unknown. is one of the most disruptive things when it comes to performing well on any situational judgment test, whether it's Casper or the MMI or anything like that. Going into it without a sense of what you can do in the time you are given and without figuring out how to make yourself clear, concise, and well understood in a rather short amount of time can absolutely act as a roadblock. And if you go into it unprepared, you get to that that first set of questions, that first prompt, and you run out of time completely unexpectedly in the middle of your thought, it's going to make you feel like you have really messed up. And that's going to cast a pall over the rest of your performance. Now, it doesn't have to, and I'm going to talk about timing and things like that in just a minute. But really the main reason that we emphasize practicing ahead of time, doing so in timed conditions, using sample questions that you can find all over our blog and all over our videos that we post here is precisely because understanding what you can do with the amount of time you're given is crucial. And in Casper. You're typing your answers and it takes a lot more time to type answers for many people than it does to speak answers. So you're going to be a little bit limited. One little tip that I often give to students is if you know you have to take a Casper test well in advance and you're uncertain about your keyboarding speed. There are easily findable searchable programs that you can get that are specifically intended to help you speed up your typing. So if you simply Google speed up your typing or test your typing speed or something like that, you can get a good idea of what your average keyboarding level is in terms of words per minute. and that will help you think through the length of your answers. And if you practice at it, you can get rather quick, rather quickly. If you are sort of towards the tail end of your undergrad and you've had to write a lot of essays, hopefully by now you're getting to the point where you can really start cranking things out. Five minutes, which is the amount of time you have to respond in Casper, goes by like a blank. But if you have strong typing skills and you're used to that five minute rhythm, you'll be able to do a lot more with the time than you realize. So that's my bonus tip. Now onto things that you actually need to do in the Casper test itself. We have lots of blogs and videos that give you tips on how to answer the different types of questions and things like that. And I'm going to have some more tips like that in another video, but I want to talk about the things that you're doing while you're constructing your answers. First and foremost, you need to make sure that you're using your own authentic voice. Now, that doesn't mean using colloquialisms or informalities or things like that, like we're just having an everyday conversation. What I mean is, hopefully, if you've been preparing in advance, you've been following our guidance, you've been looking into some of the ethical guidelines and standards and manuals and things in your field. then you're going to start taking on a certain level of vocabulary or certain kinds of stock phrases according to the principles of justice and things like that. And I want you to consider avoid using those kind of canned or stocked stock phrases because they do feel canned. They do feel inauthentic. The reviewer is going to know that that is probably not how you talk in your just sort of general formal vernacular, because very few people actually do. And you don't want to come off as disingenuous. You don't want to come off as inauthentic. You don't want to come off as scripted, because that kind of defeats the purpose. You're going to be practiced. You're going to be well acquainted with the principles. And hopefully, if you've prepared effectively, you're going to know how to respond to any number of different kinds of scenarios or... ethical challenges or things like that, but use your own voice and Don't try to create the answer that you think the evaluator wants. And that is a really, really common mistake. A lot of times, you know, for Casper, there isn't one right answer. These are really ethically nebulous and difficult situations a lot of the time. And there's not usually one correct way of going at it. They want to see your own innate thought processes. They want to see how you reason through things. They want to see the different things you're going to take into consideration. and simply articulating what you think they want to hear isn't going to give them that insight. Remember, CASPer is all about discerning your key qualities, your core competencies, your ethical convictions, and your communication skills. And if you're using stock phrases, if you're giving answers that you think they want to hear, you're not giving them what they actually need to evaluate, and you're not giving them that authentic representation of yourself. You should be... being your best self, your most refined self, your professional self, but it should still be yourself sort of at your core. Tip number two, make a decision, which is to say a lot of Casper prompts are going to be something along the lines of what would you do in this situation? and it is really easy to get sort of lost in the different perspectives that you would take in the kinds of things you would want to take into consideration and all of that and while reasoning through some of that is important because you want to demonstrate those things to the evaluator don't forget to actually tell them what you're going to do. Don't forget to actually make a decision, take an action. Delaying or deferring the option of actually making some kind of decision or taking some kind of action isn't a way to sort of fudge the test and get away with not making a statement about something that might be really ethically challenging. by all means, show them your thought processes, show them the things that you're going to take into consideration, show them the kinds of resources that you're going to want to look to in making that decision, but make sure that you are actually able to articulate that decision and reflect on what it means to make that decision, what the ramifications of that might be. Next. make actual statements. This is sort of building off the last tip, but when you're not given a what would you do situation, sometimes you're given a what would you say situation. If you're given a question that asks you specifically what would you say to this patient, this client, this friend, this person that you're interacting with in the scenario, make sure that you actually include what you would say, your actual statement, again, in the response. Again, you can get lost in simply trying to demonstrate the qualities of your response without actually articulating that response. And it's a bit of a different thing to say, I would want to be empathetic than it is to say, I would say to this person, I'm truly sorry for your loss. Or let's look into some situation or let's look into some. ways to rectify the situation. Let's look into some resources that can help you. Come on over and we'll sit down and we'll figure this out together. Actually articulating what it is that you would say in response to that person, situation, question, et cetera, is really important because they don't know what you mean when you say, I would want to be empathetic. They don't, then I'm just using that as a random example, but when you say I would want to be empathetic, you have yourself in mind, you have your actions, you know, the kinds of things you would say, the kinds of actions you would take, the kinds of body language you would display. But the evaluator doesn't know anything about any of that, especially because this is a written test. So again, not like the MMI, where you can show them who you are in person, you have to know. really spell out for them what you would say in the situation, how you would diffuse tensions, and things like that. And lastly, I sort of alluded to this point earlier, but to really make it specific. If you get into a situation and a question where you don't finish your answer or you think, oh, I really want to change something about that, and then the time is up and it advances to the next question, anything that disrupts your flow, you have to let it go. you have to shake it off, set it aside, and move ahead. In Casper and the MMI, we see this all the time where a student gets flustered at a particular station or with a particular prompt, and they carry it with them like a rain cloud over their head. And part of the process of professionalization is compartmentalizing. So you can be upset about that answer that you're not happy with, about that answer you didn't get to complete, about running out of time or, you know, whatever the situation is. But you've got to be upset about it later. Right now, the clock is still counting down. The test is still advancing. You need to keep your head in the game. So acknowledge that frustration. That's fine. But set it aside, refocus on the task ahead, and worry about all of that later. At the point where the one question advances to the next one, there is nothing you can do about it. there really isn't a single thing that you can do. You can't go back. You can't change things. You can't stop and try to come back and redo the test later or anything like that. You just can't. And so really your only option is to move forward. And you don't want one little mistake to hang up your entire Casper test. That would be catastrophic. You don't want that. Um, so, you know, this is definitely advice that's easier said than done. And it's also something that's quite frankly learned over time. Um, but oftentimes the mistakes that we make, uh, aren't, well, not, not always, but they're often not as bad as bad as we think that they are. Um, if the rest of your test is excellent and you've done really well and put forward polished, well-reasoned answers, the chances that one set one question set is going to completely undermine your entire performance. That's the chances of that are really slim, unless you just set off a wealth of red flags and said really problematic things, which hopefully, again, if you've been practicing and reviewing sample questions and expert responses, you're not going to fall into that anyway. If you're well prepared, then whatever mistake it is, it's probably not as bad as it seems. So let yourself be upset about it. But And set that upset aside for a little bit and just get through it and pull yourself out of it. Because that is resilience, right? That's determination. That's overcoming adversity. And those are precisely some of the qualities that they're looking for in people when they ask them to do situational judgment tests like CASPER. So I hope that you enjoyed this video and that it was helpful. If so, please do go ahead, like it, share it with a friend who might benefit from it. Be sure to follow us on whatever social media platform you are on right now. If you'd like us to help you go to bmocasper.com. or click the link that's either above or below this video to see our programs and schedule your free initial consultation. We'll set you up with one of our admissions experts to answer any questions you might have and get you started on your preparations. We have programs to suit any of your needs, and we're always happy to work with you to figure out which plan is going to support you and your goals most effectively. As ever, thank you so very much for your time, take good care, and I'll see you next time.