Multiple Mini Interviews: The McMaster Experience Thus Far

Abstract

The major challenge for an undergraduate medical admissions committee is to select students with desirable non-cognitive qualities from a large pool of high-achieving applicants. The selection process needs to be comprehensive as accepting the wrong person into medical school can have serious consequences, especially for patients. Thus, medical schools have complemented their selection tools of cognitive performance with assessments of non-cognitive attributes considered important in future doctors. However, traditional admissions tools designed to measure non-cognitive attributes have been plagued by questionable reliability, poor predictive validity and tenuous test security. Interest in improving the medical school admissions processes led to the development of the Multiple Mini Interviews (MMI) at McMaster University. The MMI is a series of short, structured interviews designed to assess applicants' non-cognitive attributes. Since each candidate is assessed multiple times by various assessors in various contexts, the MMI greatly dilutes the issues of chance and examiner bias inherent in traditional assessment tools. Consistent with expectations, initial research on the MMI at McMaster showed that it has high reliability and validity, findings which were replicated in subsequent studies conducted at other universities. Further studies demonstrated the MMI's ability to predict non-cognitive performances in licensing examinations. Finally, the MMI was found to be a feasible and cost-effective method of interviewing compared to traditional types of interviews. Currently, the MMI is implemented in the majority of medical schools in Canada. As well, it has gained international recognition and has been used or is in plans for use in many other countries.