The Complete Casper Test Guide (2026)

What is the Casper test?

Casper is a situational judgement test (SJT) used by admissions and selection programs to assess the human side of an applicant: empathy, ethics, communication, and judgement under pressure. It is built and delivered by Acuity Insights, and it has become one of the most widely used non-academic screens for people-centred professions worldwide.

Here is the part that surprises most people: Casper does not test what you know. It measures social intelligence and professionalism, not academic or clinical knowledge, so there is no subject matter to revise. Instead you are shown short, everyday dilemmas, a colleague behaving unfairly, a friend in distress, an awkward decision with no clean answer, and asked what you would do and why. The scenarios are deliberately not specific to your field, and your responses are open-ended, in your own words, typed or spoken to camera.

Who needs to take the Casper test?

If you are applying to a programme that cares about how you work with people, there is a good chance Casper is on your checklist. It is required or accepted by programs across many fields and many countries, usually as one part of a wider application. Use our Casper by profession guide to jump straight to your field.

• Medicine (Casper for medical school): MD and DO programs in the US, and medicine in Canada, Australia and New Zealand
• General practice training in Australia, where the RACGP National Entry Assessment uses Casper to select GP trainees
• Nursing (US and Canada) and midwifery
• Physician assistant (PA) (Casper for PA school) and associate programs
• Pharmacy (Casper for pharmacy), dentistry (Casper for dental school) and dental hygiene
• Veterinary medicine (Casper for vet school) and veterinary technology
• Allied health (physiotherapy and occupational therapy), plus speech pathology, audiology and social work
• Psychology and counselling
• Teacher education (Casper for teaching in Australia)

When you register, your Casper results are sent to the programs you select. Many Casper-requiring programs also recruit through centralised application services such as AMCAS, AACOMAS, CASPA, OMSAS, CaRMS, PharmCAS, AADSAS and VMCAS, so you may meet Casper as part of one of those cycles. The exact requirement changes every year, so always confirm the current rule on your specific program page before you book.

The Casper test format

The standard Casper test has two sections and runs for roughly 65 to 85 minutes including optional breaks. There are 11 scenarios in total and 22 questions, split between a video-response section and a typed-response section.

• Video section first. You watch or read a scenario, then record yourself answering two questions, one minute each. The real test uses your webcam.
• Typed section second. You read a scenario, then type answers to two questions with 3 minutes 30 seconds for the pair.
• Breaks. There is an optional 10-minute break after the video section, and an optional 5-minute break partway through the typed section.

Because the typed clock is tight, your typing speed genuinely matters. If you can only type 30 words a minute, you will run out of time before you run out of ideas. It is worth measuring and improving early with a free typing speed test.

What Casper measures: the 9 competencies

Acuity describes Casper as assessing nine social and professional attributes. Raters do not tick these off one by one; each of your answers is scored independently on its overall quality, your thinking, judgement and communication. Still, the nine give you a clear picture of what a strong response looks like.

• Collaboration, working with others rather than acting alone
• Communication, expressing yourself clearly and warmly
• Empathy, genuinely understanding how another person feels
• Fairness, treating people equitably and weighing different perspectives
• Ethics, reasoning honestly through dilemmas with no clean answer
• Motivation, showing real care for people and the work
• Problem-solving, gathering information and choosing a sensible course of action
• Resilience, staying steady and seeking support under pressure
• Self-awareness, knowing your limits, biases and impact on others

The single biggest differentiator is empathy. Weak answers state it ("I would be empathetic"); strong answers show it through specific, human language. Our breakdown of the 9 competencies explains exactly what raters look for in each, with examples.

How the Casper test is scored

Casper scoring is unusual, and understanding it changes how you prepare. Each of your scenarios is reviewed by a different trained rater, and the two questions in a scenario share that rater, so no one person ever scores your whole test. That keeps any single harsh or generous marker from defining your result.

• You are scored relative to others. Your performance is compared against everyone who sat the same test type in the same admissions cycle, and reported to programs as a quartile, from 1st (lowest) to 4th (highest).
• There is no pass or fail. You do not receive a numeric mark, only a quartile, and there is no fixed cut-off. Each program decides how to use your quartile within its own admissions process.
• Knowledge is never scored. Raters judge the quality of your judgement and communication, not facts.

On Caspermate we mirror this with a Q1 to Q4 scale on every answer, so you can see where a response would likely land and why. The gap between a Q2 and a Q4 is the whole game, see our Q4 vs Q2 answer comparison for side-by-side examples.

How to prepare for the Casper test

You cannot memorise your way to a good Casper score, but the people who walk in calm and finish on time are almost always the ones who practised. Here is a preparation plan that works for any profession.

1. Learn the format cold. Nothing should be a surprise on the day, not the timer, not the recording window, not the two-question structure.
2. Build empathy-first habits. Before you solve anything, acknowledge the human. Make it instinct, not an afterthought.
3. Rehearse the typed clock. Practise answering two questions in 3.5 minutes until it feels normal, and lift your typing speed if it is holding you back.
4. Practise speaking to camera. The video section trips up people who never rehearse out loud. Record yourself and watch it back.
5. Do full, timed mock tests. A handful of realistic, end-to-end runs with honest feedback on every answer will move you further than weeks of reading.

For the typed section specifically, our 3.5-minute typed response strategy shows how to structure an answer that lands a high quartile without rushing. When you are ready to practise the real thing, you can try free scenarios with instant AI feedback.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Treating it like a knowledge exam. There are no facts to recall. Reciting policies instead of engaging with people reads as cold.
• Naming a virtue instead of showing it. "I would be empathetic and ethical" earns nothing. Demonstrate it in your wording.
• Jumping straight to a solution. Acknowledge feelings and gather information before you act.
• Running out of time. Untrained typing speed and unrehearsed video answers cost real marks. Practise against the clock.
• Sounding rehearsed. Templates make you sound robotic. Practise the habits, then respond naturally to each scenario.