At MedPrep, we understand that successfully completing the GAMSAT is just the beginning! That's why we've designed an online audiovisual interview preparatory course to provide the practice and simulation you need to perform at your best on interview day.
To receive a free sample of our simulated MMI and Structured Interview questions/scenarios with model responses, simply email us with your request at freeinterviewsampler@medprepinternational.com from July 15th to September 15th 2010. This free document also contains just a fragment of the extremely valuable methodological advice, contained in the course itself, on HOW to respond to each of the various types of question/scenarios that have traditionally been posed at interview in the past four years. Methodology (i.e. question/scenario interpretation, analysis, organization, style, and delivery) will be key to your success. Practice in the absence of the correct methodology can only produce suboptimal results.
Please scroll down to the bottom of this page to learn about course details.
Make No Mistake! All Serious Candidates Prepare For This Interview. . . . though most prepare poorly.
In recent years, a number of Australian and UK medical schools have shifted educational focus away from a science-centred pedagogy to a patient-centred curriculum. There is currently an emphasis on clinical problem-solving, medical ethics, and public health. Be careful not to dismiss this important point because it is reflected in the interview.
While lay persons and medical professionals alike concord with the aim of identifying suitable medical school applicants on the basis of personal qualities (e.g. communication skills, empathy, moral sensitivity, and a collaborative orientation) in addition to clear academic merit, the idea that such qualities can be credibly measured has traditionally been controversial. Initial efforts by graduate medical schools to gauge personal qualities in candidates, by way of standardized entrance interviews, have been characterized by several variants of a protocol known as the ‘Structured Interview’. The contemporary consensus, however, is that the structured interview is inherently invalid (not necessarily reliable or repeatable). Although the structured interview format insists that the questions asked of and the scenarios introduced to the candidate are identical regardless of which interview panel the candidate is allocated, concern arises from the perception that the determination of the candidate’s performance at interview is biased by the compatibility (i.e. student vs. interviewer background) or quality (i.e. interviewer expectations) of interaction with the interviewers on the day of the interview. That is, the evaluation of a particular candidate at interview may be unreasonably affected by chance, the random allocation of interview panel per candidate. Indeed, it is well known that reliable data on student performance is achieved through multiple assessments by multiple assessors. In part, this is owing to the fact that acceptable performance in one domain does not predict acceptable performance in another domain. In addition, more examiners diminish the net likelihood of overlapping idiosyncratic biases.
In response to this perceived failure of the selection process, a more reliable interview protocol called the ‘Multiple Mini Interview’ (MMI) has been developed to replace the structured interview at most graduate medical schools. By varying context, the MMI aims to reliably sample and assess a defined subset of the candidates’ personal qualities. As such, all candidates are allocated several brief interviews with different interviewers over an extended interval of time. By optimizing the number of interviews attended by the candidate rather than the number of interviewers present per interview, the MMI format has been found to reduce the effect of chance and contextual bias, and to better predict clinical performance in medical school.
