On the Day
The 2023-24 MMIs will take place remotely using Microsoft Teams. This can be downloaded for free and works best on a laptop or desktop PC. You should participate in a quiet space where you can be alone and not disturbed for the duration of the interview. Once the interview has started, any other devices (e.g. a phone or tablet) present with you in the room should be switched off and kept out of reach. You should make sure that you have a pen and paper with you so that you are able to make any notes that you need.
Lancaster Medical School uses the multiple mini interviews (MMI) format for our interviews and have adapted our MMI stations to suit remote interviewing.
The MMI will be run in two parts,
- In part one, you will listen to an applicant briefing, before completing an assessed group work task and two short question and answer tasks in preparation for two assessed stations in the second part of the interview. In addition, there will be an opportunity to speak to a current student about our medicine programmes. This part of the interview should take just over an hour.
- In the second part of the interview, you will complete the MMI circuit comprised of eight assessed stations and one form checking station. Each station is five minutes long with two minutes in between. We expect this circuit to take just over one hour to complete, however, any technical difficulties might delay this.
At each station, your performance will be assessed against a set of clearly defined criteria, allowing the interviewer to assign you a score for that station. Interviewers are drawn from a pool of trained individuals and will include academic staff, clinicians, students, and patient and public representatives. At the end, an overall score for each applicant is calculated by adding up all their individual scores. Offers will be made to those who score highest overall in the MMI.
Examples of MMI stations
Example 1: Discuss an ethical scenario. You will have 5 minutes to read a short paragraph that outlines a current issue in medical ethics, make notes and consider your opinion. You will then have a further 5 minutes in the next station to discuss your thoughts with an interviewer. There is no right or wrong answer; this station will assess your ability to identify the issues and articulate your opinion.
Example 2: Explore your understanding of your chosen career, through discussion of your work and voluntary experience, including what you learned about your own suitability to be a doctor from these experiences.
Example 3: Talk to one of our patient and public representative group. You are not expected to take a medical history; we just want you to find out a bit about them. This will involve asking questions and responding to what the person says. We will be observing how you interact with the person and how you respond to their answers.