Chris Austin, Director of Admissions at CMU College of Medicine
We believe that CASPer will become an important part of our admissions process. Our holistic review seeks to identify service-oriented, mature, and ethical individuals for admission.
Toronto, ON (PRWEB) May 10, 2016
Altus Assessments, the creators of CASPer™, the online situational judgement test that top medical schools around the world use to pre-screen their applicants personal and professional traits, announced today that Central Michigan University College of Medicine adopted CASPer™ for the 2017 admissions cycle of their undergraduate medical program.
“We believe that CASPer will become an important part of our admissions process. Our holistic review seeks to identify service-oriented, mature, and ethical individuals for admission. This is an additional tool to help us identify outstanding candidates in a rigorous way,” said Chris Austin, Director of Admissions at CMU College of Medicine. “Ultimately we believe the addition of CASPer to our application process strengthens our ability to fulfill the mission of the College: to prepare diverse, culturally competent physicians focused on improving access to high quality health care in Michigan.”
“We’re thrilled to have Central Michigan University College of Medicine join the group of top programs who are committed to fairness and selecting the most holistically strong applicants, even in the pre-screen stage of the selection process.” says Rich Emrich, CEO of Altus Assessments. “Requiring CASPer sends a strong message to prospective applicants to CMU that their ideal students have more than just strong academic abilities.”
CASPer development started a decade ago by some of the same creators of the multiple mini interview (MMI), and is an online assessment of personal and professional characteristics of applicants, assessing traits such as cultural competence, ethical responsibility, teamwork, and communication. The test is taken from the applicant's computer online, consists of 12 sections in a situational judgement test (SJT) format and takes approximately 75 minutes to complete.
CMU strongly recommends all applicants to their medical program to take CASPer™ as part of their admissions process. This is expected to give the admissions committee a more fair, reliable and robust measure of “non-academic” traits of applicants to complement academic measures such as MCAT and GPA.
About Central Michigan:
The Central Michigan University College of Medicine was founded to produce high-quality physicians for underserved rural and urban communities in the U.S. Midwest region, particularly in central and northern Michigan.
Students admitted into the medical school learn from a curriculum designed to prepare them to practice in these areas when they complete their residency training. This curriculum uses advanced technology, including state-of-the-art simulation and clinical skills labs.
In addition to learning about the health needs of Michigan residents through the curriculum, students gain first-hand experience by working with physicians and hospitals throughout the region.
For more information on the CMU College of Medicine, please visit: https://www.cmich.edu/colleges/cmed/Pages/default.aspx
About Altus Assessments:
Altus Assessments Inc provides efficient and cost effective online applicant screening services for academic programs admissions departments (allied health, education, law, business schools etc.) looking for a proven method to pre-screen for personal characteristics and professionalism of their applicant pool.
Our primary tool is the online CASPer™ test, delivered at takecasper.com. With little cost, or administrative burden, our tool helps programs find holistically better students while reducing effort and cost applied to ineffective tools like standard interviews, reference letters and personal statements.
The CASPer™ test was developed starting a decade ago for McMaster University, and has been used to screen over 40,000 medical school applicants to date with good test reliability and predictive powers. The test is not health care specific, but rather uses everyday scenarios in the form of situational judgement testing to evaluate for universally useful skills like communication, collaboration, advocacy and judgment.
For 2016 admissions, Altus assessed 20% of all US Medical School applicants and 50% of all Canadian Medical School Applicants. We also assessed 20% of all Canadian Nursing applicants.
For more information on CASPer, please visit: https://altusassessments.com.