Transcript for:
Top Tips for Acing the Casper Test

So today we're talking about the Casper test. I've written the Casper test three times. So I've had my fair share of experience. I wrote it twice, two years ago, once was the Canadian one, once was the American one. They were quite similar. Then I wrote it again last year, in just the Canadian one. Thankfully did well, got into McMaster Medical School. So that was all good, but I've had my fair share of experience and there's not a lot of information out there. So I thought I'd make this video to give you guys my top tips of crushing the Casper test. It's a 90 minute Online assessment where you're going to have 12 different sections, each five minutes long. Each section is going to have three questions in it, and you've got to go as fast as you can answering either a verbal prompt or an online video prompt. Some prompts may be about yourself. Some prompts may be about ethical situations or situations or dilemmas that you have to answer on. It's required for McMaster Medical School as well as Ottawa Medical School, as well as some nursing schools in Canada and some medical schools in the States. So make sure where you know you're applying to one of these schools, make sure you do get ready and you do prep because although they say you shouldn't study for it, I definitely think you should prepare for it. And these are my top five tips to excel on the CASPer test. Tip number one, focus on the most important point or problem of the prompt. Now some of them are gonna be more personal and maybe quite easy. If it's just asked you. describe a situation in your life where you had a challenge. Okay, focus on that. But a lot of these ones are also ethical and they're going to ask you ethical questions, whether you should do something or you shouldn't do something, whether you should help someone or not help someone. So really identify, because there can be some fluff in there, what they're really trying to get at. You don't have much time to talk about a lot of fluffy stuff and that doesn't really get to the point. So really find that and focus on that point. It may be an ethical dilemma. Again, focus on that ethical dilemma. Really important. You're not going to have a lot of time, so focus and hone in on the actual prompt. That leads me to tip number two, present both sides of the argument. If you're going to be in the situation, what I found that really helped for me, if you had a situation, let's say hypothetically, where it was either to help someone or not to help someone, what I would do is very quickly talk about first situations helping someone, or you could pick either way, and talk about the pros and the cons of helping that person. After you very quickly describe what we would do in that situation, what the benefits and the drawbacks were. go to the other side and talk about what happens when you do if you didn't help that person. It really shows and again, do the pros and cons. It would really it really shows that you have a full understanding of every option that's available. And then from there, you make your decision based off of these two options, I would make this decision. So this leads me to tip number three, look at all the questions I found that I generally answered the questions 123. And now I did this because question one generally was the more broad. talk about what you would do in this situation. That allowed me to present both sides and make a decision. But sometimes I struggled in making a decision because it was kind of, either way could have worked. What I did is I actually looked at what the prompts were going forward, the second and third question. And sometimes those gave me some insight in what direction they wanted me to take. So hypothetically, I'm just going back to that example. Let's say they had an option of helping somebody or not helping someone. Let's say I wasn't sure which one I really wanted to pick. Generally, and I found this in a couple of situations, a further question might say, okay, Now, had you helped that person, what do you think they would, their response would have been? Now, I can't promise this, and this is kind of a different example. It's not going to be easy this all the time, but that kind of led me in certain examples. And that wasn't one example that I did, but that's kind of what I found that the further questions kind of led me into the direction. Had I made a decision in the first one? So basically it's assuming that I had made this decision, they asked me a further question that helped me. I'd actually go back and I'd answer, okay, I'd make this decision. And that was kind of a little way that I kind of gamed the system because it kind of showed me which way they wanted me to go in. So although I answered it in one, two, three, typically, I used all the information provided to me, including the further questions to help me answer my question. And that leads me to tip number four. Tip number four is go over your own experiences. I talked a lot about the ethical questions, how to address those, but that's not the entirety of the test. They're going to ask you some personal questions. Some questions that I did actually to help was actually from this website, cathpertest.com. And I'm going to attach the link that kind of shows you at the bottom where all these personal questions that you should really know how to answer like this. It shouldn't be like, oh, I have to think about why I want to do this by my doctor, some personal experiences. So the experiences that I went over that were really important, I actually went over my entire resume. I found different situations in my life that helped me kind of categorize all my experiences of situations that I had to overcome a challenge. It's going to help you for your interview to overcome a challenge or was working in a group or how I had to. I had to go past adversity or I had to work through basically an argument or how I made a decision or how I had a large life decision. There was a lot of questions that I had in my life and experiences or how I dealt with a difficult person or whatnot. All of our experiences, it's easy to just say, yeah, I did this. I, personally, I played football. But what did I really gain from football that's going to help me in a medical atmosphere? So from your perspectives, I mean, whatever your experiences are, there's going to be takeaways that you have that it's helpful to prepare ahead of time and to know what those actual particular experiences are. So when they ask you a question about time you had to overcome adversity, you're like, okay, I have six examples. Which one do I like best? Bam, bam, bam. is done because again it's you only have those five minutes so really go over your experiences and have a have a game plan of different typical questions that they may ask that you can answer tip number five practice your typing it's so important this is an online test you need to get really fast at typing because you're not going to have time to just you can't talk to somebody on an interview like this it's you can't write it down you have to be able to type so if you're a slow typer i'd say now if you're writing in october and getting yourself you know a month at least practice every day just typing, whether it's just what you did the day, make a journal. A lot of these things are going to be perspective of yourself. So it's going to be said, what would you do in this situation? So if you were to write a page a day, just either you copy something, you can read it, but you want to be able to create those situations. So write a journal, maybe spend 20 minutes just literally journaling about what you did that day, just to practice your typing. Because I found that personally, I was a good typer, not a great typer. And I found that journaling actually really helped me just speed it up. Because again, When I'm writing notes in class, I'm usually writing down what's happening on the board or whatever, and I'm not really thinking. And it's actually like it's a different way of typing. It's actually kind of more difficult. I found that actually typing just about my own ideas was actually easier because you can actually look at the keyboard. And maybe hopefully you will as well. But really just practice that where you're coming up with the ideas yourself, as you would in a question, and you're typing it. And it's going to lead me to my bonus tip. And it's kind of an obvious one, but do practice questions. I did them. They say don't study for this, but do the practice test. I wouldn't personally buy too many. I think you can find a lot of ethical questions online. There's people that offer it. I didn't buy any personally, but with these practice tests, and this is our bonus tip number six or whatever, is create your strategy. Again, I talked about how I would answer the top question and look down. That may not work for everybody. Maybe you wanted to read all the questions and answer them in your order. Whatever you think is going to be best. If you go three, one, two. Again, oops. practice looking at the prompt and immediately finding that's the question they're trying to really get at this is the this is the situation the bubble but here's the actual situation the actual question they want us to answer figure out what strategy can work best for you and about order you're going to do and how you're going to go over your situation and what you can talk about about yourself it's going to be a personal question or how you're actually going to look at the ethical situations and you may want to read a book or read up online about different ethical dilemmas it wasn't too bad for ethical in reality it's just basically what you would do in certain situations interview is much more ethically based and i'll actually give you more situations especially the mmi but i found that it wasn't too too so i wouldn't spend too much on the ethical questions but being able to really understand a situation which has a problem and i guess it can be considered ethical but it's not like medically ethical it's just an ethical dilemma what would you do in the situation and figuring out what are all the options writing out all the options and making a decision that is ethically sound and makes make sense so Those are my top tips for acing and crushing the Casper. Unfortunately, you're actually never going to see how well you did. But if you get an interview, you probably know that you did pretty well. Thanks so much for being here. Again, I'm going to be releasing a ton of other videos. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you know someone that's interested in taking the Casper that needs to take it or trying to get into medical school, send them the video. Subscribe. I'm going to be releasing a new video, generally my vlog, each week. Thanks again so much for being here, and I'll be seeing you real soon.