Casper Shows Smaller Demographic Differences Than Knowledge-Based Evaluations

Acuity Insights is committed to making more equitable, fair, and safe assessments for all applicants. Key design decisions of the Casper test helps us towards this goal:

1. Test content built with a diverse group of subject matter experts that represent the broad community, not just educators and health care professionals.

2. Behavioral tendency questions that ask applicants how they would act in a given situation, and why.

3. Open-response format that allows applicants to explain their views and provide a rationale for their decisions.

4. Responses are scored by multiple independent raters to mitigate individual implicit bias and ensure that an applicant’s final score reflects perspectives from a range of individuals who are representative of the community they will be serving. 

These design decisions make a meaningful positive impact for people from different demographic groups. Across quality assurance studies with partner programs, we have found that differences between African American or Black applicants (N=9,892) as compared to White applicants (N=62,557) is 48% smaller in Casper than in knowledge-based tests, and 28% smaller in Casper than in GPA. These trends have been observed in the literature as well for Casper1,2 and other open-response SJTs6-9. For example, a 2019 study with 9,096 applicants from New York Medical College showed that Casper had the smallest demographic differences as compared to GPA and MCAT1. For the study’s race variable, Casper showed 48-99% smaller differences. For the self-declared disadvantaged status variable, Casper showed 47-87% smaller differences.

Acuity Insights continues to invest in making admissions more fair and equitable. That’s why we’re working to implement Casper’s video response format. This allows applicants to more naturally answer questions, give their rationale, express their values, and show their reflection directly through their webcam. Pilot testing of this initiative has led to even further reductions in differences between demographic groups3-5.