Mini interviews are deemed to be a good indicator of applicants’ abilities by a number of Canadian medical schools.
The Multiple Mini Interview, initiated by the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University in 2004, is a series of 10 to 12 eight-minute interviews applicants go through while addressing ethical dilemmas and finding solutions to hands-on problems.
Adopted by 12 of Canada’s 17 medical schools, MMI is believed to reduce interviewer bias, better gauge applicant ability and make up for the perceived shortcomings of the traditional panel interview.
“The panel interview doesn’t work all that great either. They were very expensive,” Jack Rosenfeld, professor emeritus at McMaster and co-inventor of MMI, said. “And then [the] worst thing was they allowed in people that shouldn’t have gotten in and kept out people that should have gotten in.”
Despite successful results reported in the Medical Education journal in 2004 on MMI, Western’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry has yet to adopt the method.
“Although we have investigated [it] as a possibility, our method is more like a traditional interview with the same team of evaluators,” Pam Bere, manager of admissions and student affairs at Schulich, said. “We get a more realistic idea of the individual.”
Bere believed, although different, both methods measure similar qualities and abilities of applicants.
“Looking from school to school we all have our own methods to get to the same results,” she added.
However, a 2007 study to follow up with Medical Education’s report showed a correlation between a high performance level on the MMI and success on licensing exams and clerkships.
According to Rosenfeld, MMIs prevent the “halo effect” which is what people can pick up in the first 15 minutes.
“With the MMI, you get a very short time to deal with a specific topic. You don’t have time to make friends with the committee, or to use interview skills — it’s about the topic,” Rosenfeld said. “We stay away from medical topics — they’re more topics that are related to what an educated individual should know at this time.”
Rosenfeld mentioned applicants are assessed on their knowledge and ability to communicate on topics including world affairs, ethics and various political issues.
Brahm Klark, fourth-year genetics major and prospective medical school student at Western, was fond of the fact MMI focuses on ethical dilemmas.
“I would be more comfortable going through McMaster’s interview process,” Klark said. “I think part of being a physician is being a very good communicator and being able to handle various ethical issues.”
Jeff Jonusaitis, a first-year medical student at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, also liked the MMI approach. However, he acknowledged other individuals might be more comfortable with the traditional panel interview method as applicants are able to build a rapport with the panel members.
“[The MMI is] longer than a panel interview. I was in one that was 100 minutes. It’s 10 minutes per question — you get two minutes to read the question and the other eight minutes to answer the question,” Jonusaitis said. “It was a bit unnerving because the people who are interviewing you are not supposed to give you any kind of visual or verbal cues about how you’re doing. ”
Additionally, Rosenfeld believed the MMI exposes students to part of the “real world.”
“In the real world, [a few minutes is] all you’ve got,” Rosenfeld said. “We [baby] students too much in university, and that’s wrong. It’s not how the real world works. That being said, applicants think they’ve been treated fairly and enjoyed the process.”