Hey! So I got my CASPER score back and it is in the bottom quartile. I applied to 13 schools that use CASPER and they are all US MDs - how badly will this hurt my chances? I know it differs from school to school, so does anyone have a list of schools that use CASPER as a part of their admission decisions? Thanks 🙂
How heavily do schools weigh CASPER?
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What’s up my fellow American Psycho. I made a thread earlier but it never got any attention from the adcoms here. I guess the adcoms here aren’t affiliated with schools that use it so they don’t know.
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No idea.
Haha! Doing good my fellow American Psycho. Yeah it is such a school-specific thing that no general advice can be given which I acknowledged, curious though if there is a compiled list somewhere of schools that actually use casper in their admissions process rather than just collecting data.
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Ditto
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I would also like to know. It seems like no one really knows. I wish the schools were more transparent about it.
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One small quibble. It's newish thing whose claim to fame is that it is a non-cognitive metric that supposedly increases diversity while positively correlating to some really awesome stuff.
Nobody really knows whether or not this is true. All we do know is that the company that developed, administers and pitches it across the Northern border is so confident in its objective validity that they are afraid to release scores (and, until this year, even quartiles) because the test will apparently be so easy to deconstruct and game if only we knew how it was scored. Pretty awesome, huh?
The Canadians swear by it, but then again, they have a dollar that's only worth 79 cents! 😎Consequently, while the natural first reaction would be to say it must be important if the school is requiring it, that's really not necessarily the case. After all, if they are just using us to collect data to test the vendor's claims, they wouldn't come out and admit that to us, now would they?
This is really what OP is getting at, and unfortunately for him, no, no such list of schools that do (or don't) use it in admissions exists. There are probably some that don't use it, but they are certainly not going to admit that to us after forcing us to subject ourselves to it. After all, if we knew that was the case, we'd all half-*** it and ruin their data collection effort.
Other than that, you are, as usual, 1,000,000% correct. It doesn't matter. It's done. And whatever it is, it is.
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deleted1025488
Casper is a joke and will definitely do nothing to make or break your application. Also for anyone lurking, please do your due diligence on this 'exam'; there are a lot of templates out there that you can just command V and tweak accordingly to get a guaranteed high score. Casper literally uses word count as a metric in grading too lmao.
That's my hope! It would just be such a shame if I got screened out by 2 or 3 of my schools because I didn't meet some stupid CASPER cutoff lmao, no point in worrying about it now though. I have a very big list so I don't think it really hurt my chances of getting in somewhere.
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OTOH, we can't know this either, at least not without some transparency from the schools.
As I mentioned above, in Canada it's a really big deal, accounting for something like a third of your file. It's certainly nowhere near that important here (yet! 🙂), but saying it will definitely do nothing, without any data at all to back that up, is the other extreme of saying it's huge.
The answer is definitely somewhere in the middle, depending on whether the school is using it at all, or just using us to study it. If they are in fact using it, you can't know that being in the bottom quartile won't break an application, depending on where it is relative to everyone else before the score is taken into account.
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deleted1025488
Frankly I find that hilarious! But then again I'm not the AAMC $nonprofit$ nor an adcom so who knows. I still stand by my statement that the exam is a joke and should not be considered in any capacity in its current state where command V can carry you to a 75th-100th percentile score. Maybe that'll give me a late II at the single casper school I applied to 😛
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deleted1108964
There was recently a powerpoint/presentation published by the people who evaluate CASPER which essentially summed up to "we don't know what the hell we're doing when grading these" and "it is not accurate." I also got a 75th-100th percentile score by practically wordspilling and making sure to consider all viewpoints even if it seemed like a complete stretch.
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Test is definitely a joke. OTOH, there are plenty of folks on reddit who thought they mastered the command-V technique and were less than thrilled with the results. YMMV with that.
The test is BS, but that doesn't mean that adcoms looking for a magic bullet to increase diversity won't glom onto something that a third party can show has a positive correlation to something they think is valuable. That's why you simply cannot assume all schools will think it's garbage and not place any value on it, just because others don't think it's worth using.
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deleted1025488
So how does one go about making these 'standardized' entry exams? I'd like to jump on the train and make a 3 hour reflex examination required by all premeds to add on to the MCAT, SJT, CASPER, etc. tests that have zero merit in predicting your ability as a physician. I can then milk millions off of neurotic premeds and retire at 21! Nonprofit, of course!
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deleted1108964
Ah yes, the classic 'standardized' exam that gives completely variable grades to masses of people using the same template. My guess is that the "multiple people grading" scheme is just a bunch of BS, and that only one person ever sees your CASPER and grades it on a rubric. They'll either see your word spill and template and love it, or they'll hate it. There's really no other explanation for why people literally using fill-in templates can get from 0-25th or 75th-100th percentile.
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Seriously? That's probably why I got 1st quartile then. This is ridiculous.
So take this with a grain of salt because I have no idea how I did on CASPer, but when I applied in 2019, the only schools that interviewed me where I didn’t have state connections (two “random” schools across the country) both required the CASPer test. So I just assumed I did well on it and they actually looked at it or something.
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Let's assume for the sake of argument that you did well. If so, your experience is certainly consistent with what @gonnif reported, meaning that at least some schools use it as an input in making interview decisions. But that doesn't mean all schools that require it actually use it, or that schools use it to screen out those with bad scores. Did any of your CASPer schools not interview you? If so, what does that tell us?
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deleted1108964
A reflex test would probably be more useful than both of those honestly. Hell, at this rate, and with the usage of epic, a typing test would be more indicative of physician performance.
Sounds like speculation. I'll add to the speculation too. Typing more just gives more opportunity to touch upon things that they look for
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deleted1025488
Nope, not speculation. It was written/presented in a ppt by the CASPER admins or something. Can't find it now since I'm on mobile but I can link it later. It was one of 6 factors I think they grade on?
To the best of my knowledge that’s not true but I’d be happy to be linked to the presentation to prove me wrong. I’ve read the PowerPoints and literature on casper (which is what I believe you are referencing) and those only mention how raters are rated to ensure validity among all recruited raters. If they actually gave out metrics in these, people on sdn and reddit would be discussing those more, and it wouldn’t be such a black box.
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deleted555445
I believe what he's referring to is somewhere they talk about "effort" being one of the grading criteria. Like the more effort you put in, the higher score you get. And I think some people took that to translate to word count, and while I doubt they do a literal word count and assign points that way, if the grader is told to evaluate for effort they will probably award more points to answers that are longer and contain more thoughts, even if the thoughts might not be well developed.
greys_anatomy
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4th quartile people, how long did you spend preparing? Taking it in 2 days and didn't really have time to study a lot...
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deleted555445
I took the practice test, red through one reddit post about "strategy". I wouldn't put more effort into it than familiarizing yourself with the structure and the interface. Just try to comment on everyone's perspectives and how solutions would affect different people.
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deleted1108964
Literally 10 minutes. I only have 1 CASPER requiring program on my list and it was my verification throwaway that I didn't know required CASPER, so I ended up just taking it a bit later and just said f it.
I did the same thing I do on long bio exams where I have to describe some long a** mechanism or pathway: just wrote random (but relevant, I think) stuff for as long as I could and wrote as much as I could trying to cover literally anything and everything.
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I did the Bemo practice questions, watched one of their 10 min videos, and did the Casper practice test. That's it and got 4th quartile.
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Here's the thing that everyone's either glossing over, or doesn't realize, and it's the reason the test really is total BS --you're asking about 4th quartile, but it is really difficult to prepare or game it because you are not being scored against an objective standard. You are being scored strictly against everyone else taking it on the single date you take it.
As a result, assuming you, me, @effectedtag and @Johntwin2000 are the only people taking it, we all follow exactly the same strategy, and our responses are nearly identical -- we are STILL going to each find ourselves in one of the 4 quartiles! It's not like the MCAT where there is an objectively correct answer, and the scale is normalized over multiple test administrations.
The only thing you can do is familiarize yourself with the format of the test and what they purport to be looking for, and then just close your eyes and hope for the best. Good luck!!!
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deleted1108964
Is this actually true? because in that case, considering it's graded by actual people and not automatically, I think word spill (aka word count) might actually directly translate to a higher score unless you are writing gibberish.
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I will say I had a list of things in my head. Like consider all viewpoints, approach and bring people to the side, talk to them in an empathetic manner. Stuff like that. For the questions where they talk about you see so and so on the beach but they said they were sick, always just say you would first approach that person in a non-judgmental way, find out more about the situation, gather all the facts... I basically tried to get all these buzzwords across on every question and it worked.
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None of us knows the precise metrics the graders use to grade, but, yes, it's absolutely true.
"Each section of the test is scored by a unique rater, making the Casper score a robust measure made up of many independent impressions of you. Raters are assigned to a particular scenario from a Casper test and provided with relevant instructions and background knowledge about the topic at hand. Once prepared, raters are served responses from one scenario and multiple different applicants to rate. It’s important to note that no rater will ever score an applicant more than once. As such, an applicant’s final score is always comprised of 12 unique rater impressions. This allows us to dilute any bias that one rater’s subjectivity may bring to the table."
RustySpitfire
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Based on everything I've read about Casper so far, it would be fairer for it to just be a combination of obvious questions ("Have you ever committed murder? Are you planning on committing murder in the future? Do you think pineapple is an appropriate pizza topping?") and a bingo wheel spitting out random numbers to indicate how much your application should be helped by Casper.
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Not even -- it's meant to be a non-cognitive objective metric with a positive correlation to good later outcomes meant to increase diversity. So, you really need to replace the bingo wheel with whatever will achieve their stated desired goal (high score = increased diversity and success in school and profession).
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deleted555445
Really they should just eliminate everyone who doesn't like cilantro
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Putting in a plug here for the CASPer/Situational Judgement Test forum:
forums.studentdoctor.net
I don't know that it has any answers, particularly about the Black Mirror-esque lack of transparency in scoring, but there are some practice questions that might help students who want to prepare for the test.
Casper/PREview/Situational Judgment Tests
The Casper test prep community. Learn strategies and share tips for the Casper and other Situational Judgment Tests (SJT).
forums.studentdoctor.net
I don't know that it has any answers, particularly about the Black Mirror-esque lack of transparency in scoring, but there are some practice questions that might help students who want to prepare for the test.
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Do you mind me asking how you got to see your score? It was my understanding that Casper scores weren’t released to students. Did they change that this cycle?
