Who Sits the CASPer Test Optometry?Â
This CASPer test must be sat by applicants to certain Optometry programs in the US and Canada. If you are applying to the Optometry program at either Salus University or the University of Missouri St Louis, then you will have to sit the CSP-10101 CASPer: US Professional Health Sciences. Alternatively if you are applying to Optometry programs at the University of Waterloo or Université de Montréal, you must sit the CSP-10201 CASPer: Canadian Professional Health Sciences.
Key Features
Although very few schools currently require that you sit the CASPer exam if you are applying to Optometry, there are still plenty of opportunities to sit this exam throughout the year. That’s because this particular CASPer is used by many different healthcare programs (like pharmacy or radiography, for example.) Some schools will require you to sit a new part of the CASPer as well, called Snapshot. This is not an exam, but rather a video interview. You should double check whether the schools that you have applied to will require that you do Snapshot or not. An example of a school that does now require Snapshot is the University of Waterloo. They explain that they use Snapshot to see applicants’ personal qualities and communication skills.
Your raters – the term CASPer uses for those responsible for marking the papers – will be drawn from the same country as the program that you’re applying to. This means American raters for US programs, and Canadian raters for Canadian programs. Whilst they will not all be healthcare professionals, they should all have an interest in healthcare, education, or both. Remember that they will not, in most cases, have specialist healthcare knowledge, or specialist knowledge of ethics as applied to healthcare. However, they will have been assessed and trained by CASPer prior to being able to rate answers.
As stated above, this type of CASPer exam is universal for Allied Health Professions, as well as Pharmacy. Therefore, you should anticipate that the exam will feature real world scenarios answerable by any type of healthcare applicant. Each of the ten core competencies that CASPer is designed to assess should be prepared for thoroughly. These competencies are: collaboration, communication, empathy, equity, ethics, motivation, problem solving, professionalism, resilience, and self awareness.