CASPer: Health Sciences Speciality Training

Key Features

 The questions are likely to follow the same structure as the general Medicine CASPer, i.e. you should expect around one in ten questions to feature a hospital setting, and the remainder to be general scenarios. You should expect a fairly equivalent breakdown between the different core domains. Many of you that will be sitting the CASPer for residency programs will already have encountered it for your college admissions, and you should therefore draw upon your experiences in the first test to help prepare you for this next step.

You should note that this CASPer – technically labelled the GME Suite, or Graduate Medical Education Suite, is not just the same 15 question format as the typical CASPer, but instead combines this with two other assessments – hence ‘Suite’. These two additional assessments are Snapshot and Duet. Snapshot will take ten minutes to complete, and Duet should take between fifteen and twenty minutes to complete.

Core Components

 The core CASPer test, as stated, will be similar to that for a typical Medicine course, and look to provide an overall breakdown of your abilities with other people, professionalism, and ethics. Residency programs are looking for the same calibre of person as a medical college, so don’t expect this CASPer SJT to feel any different to the one that you sat before, although some residence program directors have implied that there may be a bias toward questions on ethics, professionalism and leadership. Expect 15 questions broken down across two parts, with the first being 9 written answers and the second part being 6 video-recorded answers.

Snapshot consists of a one way recorded video interview, which is designed to provide you with a chance to show your personal attributes to the program that you are applying to. It was designed to show someone’s personality, and you should therefore expect questions closer to generic ‘icebreakers’ than tough technical or ethical quandaries. You should dress professionally, and CASPer advises avoiding bright colours, which could prove distracting for those reviewing the footage. Wearing a shirt or blouse is suitable. You should have a neutral backdrop.

Duet will provide you with 30 program characteristics that must be compared in pairs, across three categories. There are no time limits for Duet, but it is typically completed within 15-20 minutes. The simple concept behind Duet is that you compare the alignment of your personal values with those of the residency program to which you are applying. There is no need to prepare for Duet, and as it stands no material available in the public domain which might help one prepare. This will likely change over the coming years if Duet becomes more widely used. You should take as much time as you need, ensure that you understand all the characteristics, and consider which pairing would be most suitable for your residency program. Whilst CASPer advises ‘use your gut… you are not meant to spend long considering each,’ the opposite may in fact be true if you wish to succeed in this test.