How Long Should I Study For CASPer?

The answer to this must depend to an extent on your learning style and your personal circumstances. However, we can provide an overview of how long the average student might spend, and the reasoning behind this number.

Understanding the CASPer Test Format

The CASPer assesses your behavioural tendencies – essentially the way in which you approach situations and other people – through providing you with a range of real world scenarios, and asking you for your feedback on them, or how you might approach them yourself. The team behind the test therefore claim that it is largely impossible to revise for it, but as the huge amount of prep material for other SJTs (situational judgement tests) across the world attests, preparing for these kinds of tests is possible – it just takes some time.

Recommended Preparation Duration

In general, we advise students to spend two months preparing for the CASPer. We advise this duration because there is a variety of different skills to learn, a breadth of understanding to gain, and because you must be confident enough in your learning that it stands up to the intense pressure of the CASPer test.

Step-by-Step Study Process

You should begin the studying period by researching the test thoroughly. You should read through all of our resources, and look at the official CASPer site as well. You must have a solid understanding of the test's format, as well as its aims, in order to be able to do well in it.

Next, you should ensure that you have some grounding in ethics – if you are applying to Medicine, this is especially important, and learning medical ethics should continue throughout the revision period. After this – you should still have at least six weeks to go – you should begin using practice questions and model answers. These will allow you to understand areas in which you are stronger, and others in which you are weaker.

Regarding your progress, you must recognise the domains of questions throughout – i.e. which areas are being examined – in order to understand where you are doing well, or where you need to work more. You should develop relevant experiences for each domain, and ensure that you are confident on them, and able to write them out quickly. You should also develop your own approach to answering questions throughout this process, based on our model approach included with our resources.

Towards the end of the two months, ensure that you are practising in test conditions only, and revise our tips to make sure you do as well as possible. Try to practise answering in front of a webcam as well, to make sure you're ready for the second section.