MMI Interviews Make No Sense

[deleted393595]

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Now that I'm a M2 and have had some patient exposure via SPs and hospital patients, I don't understand how MMI at all correlates to actual practice.

First, you have significantly more time to prepare ahead of time for patient encounters. Second, patient encounters have several portions that are linear to them, such as the opening for instance. Indeed, several texts such as Silverman et. al's "Skills for Communicating with Patients" have broken down the patient encounter into several portions that can be scripted and that have been verified by studies examining doctor-patient communication.

Third, my experience with the MMI interview process has been a mixed bag. There have been several questionable instances: At a prominent school (that may or may not be in NYC), an interviewer sharply criticized me halfway through for not addressing the prompt - only to realize that she herself had misread it (And I was the 3rd kiddo in the rotation that she had talked to). At another school (that may or may not be in North Carolina), another interviewer was munching on a juicy burger during my discussion, and was obsessed with shaking out the last of his fries that had fallen into his takeout bag.

Perhaps I'm missing out on something here. Can someone offer anything in support of MMI?

 

[Gurby]

Theoretically, it could be more objective if done properly. But I suspect that in practice it just gives you 10 chances to torpedo yourself as opposed to 2 or 3.

 

[SpartanWolverine]

MMI doesn't necessarily correlate to clinical practice. But there's some decent evidence behind it. Just search on Google Scholar (or look at a couple of these below).

The Ability of the Multiple Mini-Interview to Predict... : Academic Medicine
Assessment of non‐cognitive traits through the admissions multiple mini‐interview
The Relationship between Interviewers’ Characteristics and... : Academic Medicine

However, having been an MMI interviewer, it's tough to train everyone to grade reliably (perhaps because there are no objective criteria). So potentially schools outside of McMaster are not quite as generalizable... and it sounds like you may have had some experience with interviewers who weren't even remotely well-trained.

 

[operaman]

The underlying fact proven out time and again in multiple studies is that all of us are terrible at interviewing and reliably selecting good candidates. The HR literature has looked at this extensively and traditional style interviews just don't reliably result in good employees or students. The thought behind MMI is to spread the bias and whatnot around make interviews a little more objective. Even so, they aren't great either, but the hope is that they are better than the old way.

I don't think the idea is at all to simulate patient encounters even if it may be partially pitched that way. As you noted, the reality of patient interviewing is quite different. Like everything else, MMI is limited by the quality of people doing it. Sounds like OP had some lackluster experiences. As an applicant, that would certainly be something I would take into account regarding how seriously faculty at a given institution take their jobs.

 

[ShaolinMaster]

I realized this when an "actor", using that term loosely, faked cried about a random situation that I had to coach them on. The good part about it was, I just looked for the people at lunch with the wtf face and knew I had found my people.

 

[sharkbyte]

I did a couple MMIs when I interviewed...Idk they were pretty fun haha. It felt like a game almost. At one school a couple of the faculty members were aggressive/challenging which made me feel a bit uncomfortable but otherwise they were a good experience to have, I guess. Made you think and talk about yourself or ethical topics in a different way. If anything, I feel like the MMI format got rid of the whole beating around the bush, taking-forever-to-make-a-point kind of setup that the traditional interview can create and forced me to say what I needed to say up front within those 6 or 8 minutes.

On the other hand though, I felt like in the traditional interviews I was able to explain myself more thoroughly esp with regards to things like prior adversity, motivations for medicine, etc. So I really have no idea which one is better.

 

[kb1900]

For the most part I found the MMIs I went to fairly easy going with the exception of one that may or may not be in nyc. IN which the interviewer clearly did not care to be there nor cared for the prompt

 

[PantsOnFire]

For the most part I found the MMIs I went to fairly easy going with the exception of one that may or may not be in nyc. IN which the interviewer clearly did not care to be there nor cared for the prompt

Now that I'm a M2 and have had some patient exposure via SPs and hospital patients, I don't understand how MMI at all correlates to actual practice.

First, you have significantly more time to prepare ahead of time for patient encounters. Second, patient encounters have several portions that are linear to them, such as the opening for instance. Indeed, several texts such as Silverman et. al's "Skills for Communicating with Patients" have broken down the patient encounter into several portions that can be scripted and that have been verified by studies examining doctor-patient communication.

Third, my experience with the MMI interview process has been a mixed bag. There have been several questionable instances: At a prominent school (that may or may not be in NYC), an interviewer sharply criticized me halfway through for not addressing the prompt - only to realize that she herself had misread it (And I was the 3rd kiddo in the rotation that she had talked to). ?

FWIW*, my New York interview had this as well; It was my first station and I thought he just had the prompt wrong. Turns out, the other people in my group had a similar experience, so I think it was to test what you would do in a situation like that ( would up respectfully correct the mistaken party in a high stress situation?).

 

[Osteoth]

Theoretically, it could be more objective if done properly. But I suspect that in practice it just gives you 10 chances to torpedo yourself as opposed to 2 or 3.

Agree. I feel like it takes some time to read the room during an interview and figure out how to angle your questions to the people listening. Can't really do that in an MMI and you have to pray that you're selling the right stuff to the right people.

 

[WingedOx]

Now that I'm a M2 and have had some patient exposure via SPs and hospital patients,

Whoa there Mr. Expert...

 

[mehc012]

Now that I'm a M2 and have had some patient exposure via SPs and hospital patients, I don't understand how MMI at all correlates to actual practice.

First, you have significantly more time to prepare ahead of time for patient encounters. Second, patient encounters have several portions that are linear to them, such as the opening for instance. Indeed, several texts such as Silverman et. al's "Skills for Communicating with Patients" have broken down the patient encounter into several portions that can be scripted and that have been verified by studies examining doctor-patient communication.

Third, my experience with the MMI interview process has been a mixed bag. There have been several questionable instances: At a prominent school (that may or may not be in NYC), an interviewer sharply criticized me halfway through for not addressing the prompt - only to realize that she herself had misread it (And I was the 3rd kiddo in the rotation that she had talked to). At another school (that may or may not be in North Carolina), another interviewer was munching on a juicy burger during my discussion, and was obsessed with shaking out the last of his fries that had fallen into his takeout bag.

Perhaps I'm missing out on something here. Can someone offer anything in support of MMI?

I also don't understand how traditional interviews correlate to actual practice. I've yet to sit down in the clinic and have a patient ask me about my interests and opinions on cheating and professionalism and what I do for stress relief and whether I'm concerned about burnout. If your patient visits are hour-long sessions with the doctor talking about themselves 70% of the time, you go to a drastically different hospital than I do.

What I have seen more resembles a quick, "scan the chart, assess the situation, enter the room and see who's there (patient? family? both?), smile, build a quick rapport, say what you came in to say, field a few questions without backing yourself into a corner, exit, *breathe*...start again". Is that exactly an MMI? No. But it's not that dissimilar of an interaction style, subject matter at hand notwithstanding.

The advantage in your case about those 3 kiddos who were interviewed with the interviewer misreading the prompt...they had a bunch of other stations where the interviewer didn't do that and wasn't waiting for them to mess up because they'd tanked that one prompt earlier, and the interviewer repeated that specific prompt enough to notice her mistake and hopefully equalize/minimize its impact for the 3 of you who she was mistaken for, rather than her reading through 5 different prompts and marking just you down horribly for the one she misread.

To be blunt, in MMIs, if the interviewer sucks at something like that, or is simply biased, they do it more evenly across students and it's only one part of each student's overall eval.

 

[SpartanWolverine]

...
To be blunt, in MMIs, if the interviewer sucks at something like that, or is simply biased, they do it more evenly across students and it's only one part of each student's overall eval.

And many schools will drop the lowest single encounter grade if it's an outlier.