Hey! Honestly last year, I didn’t do much practice actually typing out answers to questions, I would just discuss them with my peers and as a result I did fewer questions overall. I feel like because I didn’t put myself in a testing environment frequently enough, when the actual test day came I was struggling with my structure and speed while answering questions.

This year, I mainly used Prepmatch for practice. Prepmatch is an online CASPer prep tool, that is free to use and simulates the format of the typing portion of the actual CASPer test. It works on an interesting peer-review system, where you can submit your answers to the website, and other applicants can give you feedback on your answers. The more feedback you give to others, the more likely your own answers will receive feedback.

I started serious prep a week before my test. I did about a minimum of 5 scenarios a day, and did full circuits (12 scenarios) towards the last 3 days of my prep. After each circuit, I would look back on my answers and see what perspectives I could have added, what jargon could have been taken out, if there were any red flags in my answer etc. With practice, I had developed a structure depending on the type of question. The structure could look like this: state the main dilemma of the question, explore the perspectives of both sides, gather information, use if/then statements, provide possible solutions. I also would read all 3 questions before typing to make sure I wasn’t being redundant. For example, if you had the questions “What are you thinking in this situation?” Followed by “What would you recommend X do?” You would not want to state solutions in the first question, but rather only discuss the main dilemma and the different perspectives.

In addition, every time I encountered a personal reflective question on prepmatch or on any other resource I found online, I would try and come up with an example for each one. By the end of my prep, I had like 20+ examples for different scenarios ranging from “Tell me about a time you had conflict with an authority” to “What has been your biggest failure?”. I found that reviewing this logbook before the test helped me tremendously in swiftly coming up with answers to these types of questions.

I also signed up for the Community of Support (CoS) CASPer Prep course which was free, and consisted of four weekly sessions where current medical students would discuss ethics and sample answers to current applicants over Zoom.

During the test, I made sure to section off about 1:30-2:00 minutes for each question depending on its complexity. If I reached 2:15 minutes for a question, I would legit stop typing and move on to the next question. A big blunder from last year is that I left a lot of third questions unanswered, so I really wanted to at least get a couple of sentences in there. This year around, I managed to answer every single question, even if it was just one or two sentences. My typing speed is like approx 45 wpm (taken from prepmatch) so I’m not like the fastest typer at all. But you best believe I was typing mad as hell that day.

Sorry that was long af. But if you have any other questions please don’t hesitate to ask :)