what's up you guys rex here this video is my complete guide to the casper exam [Music] so first off a little bit about me my name is rex i'm not a doctor yet by any means i am a first year medical student at duke university and i had way more success than i ever dreamed i would have in my medical school application so i want to pass on all of what i learned onto you so that you can have as much success or more in your medical school application cycle so what is the casper exam it is the computer-based assessment for sampling personal characteristics and it is yet another test exam that you have to take to get into some medical schools i'll have a link down below of all the medical schools that currently require it it seems that broadly speaking more and more medical schools are requiring it each year and it is essentially a situational judgment test that tries to measure your soft skills in the same way that the mcat tries to measure your actual like scientific and hard knowledge based skills so now my quick like disclaimer about the casper exam and why i kind of hate it so it was developed by mcmaster university which is a medical school in canada in case you didn't know to sort of fill that gap that it's thought that the actual like mcat that filled one need but there was this missing link of having some sort of situational soft judgment skills test and that's all well and good but mcmaster university has lost all credibility forever and always for me after when covid first happened at the end of the 2019-2020 application cycle in mcmaster thought it was the right and fair thing to do to literally use a random lottery to help decide applicants fates i'm not joking they actually did this i'll link down below to a news article about it they not only had a random lottery that they factored into their process somehow for people who interviewed but they decided people who had not yet interviewed would never interview and they would just have more of a random lottery factoring in and everybody on the waitlist would just be randomized in order by a random lottery how they think they still have credibility after thinking that is a fair thing to do is beyond me mcmaster is also the university that pioneered the mmi or the multiple mini interview that is something i have a lot of opinions on that is beyond the scope of this video i think it institutes a lot of bias into the application cycle and discriminates against a lot of people particularly based on socioeconomic status and there's a lot of studies that support that but story and rant for another time we've mastered university not a fan and so they're by extension i don't really trust them in coming out with casper exam so just note that as my baseline i have a little bit of skepticism about if we really need yet another exam for medical students to take and yet another thing to pay for for their medical school application that's just my personal thoughts so back to what is casper it is composed of 12 different sections each section you either get a video scenario or a word-based scenario and it's some sort of situation for you to do some judgment on situational judgment test and you then answer three questions where you type out your answers and you have five minutes to answer the questions overall the exam takes about 60 minutes to 90 minutes you can take a 15 minute break in between you don't have to while you're taking the exam you have to have your web camera on and be in clear view and filming yourself while you take it this is something you just sign up for and take from the comfort of your own home and it is scored by human raters you have a different rater grading each section is what they say and it is totally black box of exactly how it's graded you do get some sort of numerical score i've heard that it is score from zero to nine i don't know if that's 100 true and i just sort of don't like that it is so black box that nobody knows how it scored and people i've talked to on admissions committees they don't even know how to interpret the score sometime and so it's difficult for them to even use it because they don't know how it's being scored but mcmaster university promises that it is somehow fair and somehow scientific and so you gotta trust them and you still have to take it because medical schools trust it and medical schools make you take it i've also heard that this nine points per section isn't necessarily broken up as like three points per question that it might be you can get a full nine points you just answered to the questions i don't know if that's true or not so i'm not going to tell you to spend most of your time on one question or make sure you get to all three make that decision on your own when i took it i made sure to answer all three questions and now the biggest thing to understand about the casper exam and really why i dislike it is that it is such a typing test and so it is in many ways a test of what elementary school did you go to were you lucky enough to go to an elementary school where they made you have a typing class i was very fortunate that i went to an elementary school that did and so i felt like i was adding a huge advantage just because of where i went to elementary school nothing else about my personality or personal characteristics just because i can type and it really frustrates me that you'll find examples of like how to take the casper exam that give ridiculously long expert examples and so i'll link down below and show it on the screen here of here's one where they have their expert answer to the questions that they're saying you should emulate this well guess what this answer they have is 971 words you would have to type at 194 words a minute to be able to write that answer out in five minutes assuming you spent no time thinking and gathering your thoughts so make sure when you're looking at example answers that the experts put out that they actually have some sort of reasonable word count to them in length to know what actually is realistic for you to be able to type if you are a really good typer and type 60 words a minute it's probably a pretty good bet to say maybe you can get out 60 words for question 1 60 for question 2 60 for question three that is three minutes of perfect typing you're gonna have to backspace some you're gathering your thoughts so realize you're only going to have probably about 60 words to answer each question depending on your typing speed so now what are my tips for preparing for and actually taking the casper exam my number one thing is to focus on minimizing nerves i think that is the biggest thing you can do casper is meant to be something you can't study for i don't think that's true you can study and prepare for it but the biggest thing you can do more than anything else is minimize your nerves and so you do that by understanding the test format thoroughly that you're not surprised by anything establishing a good environment to take it in where you know you're gonna be filmed and you don't aren't stressing about what's in the background or if someone's gonna interrupt you focus on that and do just practice your typing a little bit mostly just to practice typing under pressure that it's like stressful taking this exam and so if you normally type 60 words a minute maybe with a lot of errors thrown in there from the stress of taking exam you're only be typing 30 words a minute so you want to practice typing in some stressful scenario even if that's just practicing online typing tests a couple times just so you are used to it my next tip is that i do think it is worth looking at some scenarios i don't think you should spend too much time doing this you should get a general feel for the style of ethical scenarios and situations they might ask you about you shouldn't bother trying to memorize a ton of these look up casper examples and also look up some like mmi examples they can have some very similar styles of questions to the two of them that they're both trying to get at situational judgment tests and they were both developed by the same university to try and do similar things tip number three is have at least some understanding of medical ethics a lot of times there might be a question related to medical ethics at least have a general idea of what hipaa is know that patient privacy is a huge deal so if the scenario is talking about some co-worker at the hospital sharing information about a patient that is a huge no-go even if it would be some sort of thing that was okay in any other work environment sharing about patients is not okay whatsoever in the medical field number four is really try to consider all sides of an issue don't lock into i would do this in your answers generally try to show you are thinking about an issue from different ways different approaches and different people's perspectives within the scenario number five is establish any assumptions you are making in your answer what i mean by this is say stuff like well if i'm answering this as a co-worker i would say this if i'm answering this as a friend i would come with this perspective also establish the kind of relationships you are assuming in the scenarios are you assuming you have a great relationship with your coworker are you saying well maybe if i was more distant with this co-worker and had a very professional formal relationship i would approach the scenario this way just make sure you establish those so you are doing a better job of explaining your answer and that comes to number six is explain explain explain a big part of this exam is that they can get to understand your thought process and that is done through explaining you probably i don't know black box scoring you probably are going to get more points by thoroughly explaining an answer than saying you would do a hundred different things but it's not clear why you are doing them and so they wouldn't actually get insight into your ability to think critically think with compassion and understanding and taking into account and synthesizing all the information in the scenario so those are all of my thoughts on the casper exam i hope you found this video helpful i hope it didn't turn into too much of a rant because casper exam is not my favorite part in fact it's probably my least favorite part of the entire medical school application process check out the playlist on the right if you want to see more of my videos with advice for the medical school application process if you have any questions comments or concerns leave them down below i'll respond to every single comment as always like the video if you liked the video dislike the video if you disliked the video until next time don't be ordinary go be great