See the Whole Student

Casper is an open-response situational judgment test (SJT) that measures social intelligence and professionalism, to help you evaluate your applicants holistically. Backed by 20 years of research, Casper is used by 500 higher education programs worldwide to identify applicants who are more likely to be successful in their program.

Being successful, in and out of the workplace, requires many non-technical, personal and professional skills like ethics, empathy and resilience. Casper presents your applicants with challenging scenarios and questions that allow them to demonstrate these skills by responding to the presented scenarios in a professional and socially intelligent manner, using their unique life experiences.

Applicants answer in their own words via typed and video responses, unlike most other SJTs (multiple-choice format), ensuring Casper is resistant to cheating or gaming by humans or AI. By asking applicants to respond to open-ended questions within a limited response time and never having a single correct answer for any question, Casper ensures applicants showcase their realistic behavioral tendencies.

Casper assesses the ability to effectively reflect on and communicate responses to interpersonal and professional dilemmas using critical reasoning and social interpretation. Casper scores applicants on their ability to demonstrate social intelligence and professionalism as a whole, giving programs a single measure of their soft skills that fits seamlessly into your
admissions process.

Scenarios are designed to target a balance of the following competencies, which are important for both academic and professional success in all disciplines: collaboration, communication, empathy, fairness, ethics, self-awareness, resilience, problem solving and motivation. There is no single correct answer to any question on Casper, since test questions are designed to measure a broad range of personal and professional characteristics at once, and allow applicants to give genuine, authentic responses.

In a Casper test, applicants are presented with real-world, video and written scenarios, followed by open-ended questions. The test has 2 sections: video response and typed response. Applicants have to answer the questions in the required response format, within the allotted time.

Each response that an applicant provides is rated by a different human rater, all of whom have been extensively trained. Casper results are provided to partners as a single z-score and percentile, while applicants receive their quartile score.

More general FAQs about Casper are available on our applicant website.

Casper is rated by human raters who represent the community that students will serve when they graduate. All our raters are carefully selected and undergo extensive training. Our team of psychometricians and scientists also conduct ongoing quality assurance testing and competence monitoring. After their first year, all raters undergo mandatory annual training and recertification.

A different rater rates each scenario on a single Casper test. Using multiple raters minimizes the potential for a rater’s first impression of an applicant to impact the interpretation of the rest of their performance, either positively (the “halo effect”) or negatively (the “horn effect”).

Our raters come from many different lived experiences and educational backgrounds, ensuring that they represent the population students will work in when they graduate.

As part of the hiring process, potential raters take a shortened version of the Casper test, to give them insight into what test-takers experience, and so we can evaluate how they respond. They also complete a reading comprehension test and a one-on-one video interview, where a member of our Rating team will meet with them to verify their application details and get to know them better.

All raters undergo training and they must pass a quality threshold before they are allowed to rate active tests. All raters are required to train and recertify annually, to learn about any new insights or updates to the test.

Researchers at Acuity Insights conducted a study, published in Frontiers in Medicine after a peer review process, titled “Evaluating factors that impact scoring an open response situational judgment test: a mixed methods approach”.

The findings of this study demonstrate that scores on open-response situational judgment tests could vary based on what test takers focus on in their responses and how they construct them. This study explores these sources of variance in more detail.

We have rigorous measures to ensure scores are reliable and valid across all test instances. This includes regular monitoring of the tests’ psychometric properties and conducting validity research with academic institutions. (This data is published in the Casper Technical Manual).

The following studies show the correlation between Casper and its relationship to relevant outcome measures, including assessing applicants’ non-academic skills:

• Saxena 2024
• Roberts 2024
• Buchs 2021
• De Visser 2018
• Goodell 2023
• Woodson 2022
• Shipper 2017
• Ying Ling 2018

We provide applicants with a quartile score to ensure meaningful and accessible results. We continuously gather feedback and explore opportunities to enhance our communication with applicants, ensuring they receive meaningful insights while maintaining test security.

No. Everything they need to take Casper is available to them in their Acuity Insights account on our applicant website.

The majority of our publications and presentations, including peer-reviewed publications, are done in collaboration with our partner programs. We partner with programs to create and design studies because we want our research to have immediate, real impact for admissions professionals. In the last year alone, we’ve participated in 29 research partnerships and publications. And, to date, over 150 internal and external analyses have been conducted on Casper, across psychometric elements like reliability, validity and fairness.

Research results for Casper’s efficacy can be found here.

Casper is for every program where admissions teams want to see a more holistic picture of every applicant. Although Casper’s early success came from medical schools and health science disciplines, the soft skills assessed by Casper are important for all future professionals’ success. We now work with partners from other professional programs, including education, business, and engineering.

Medical schools have long recognized that excellence in medicine extends beyond academic achievement.

The CanMEDS framework, developed by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, emphasizes that being an effective physician requires a combination of medical knowledge and key professional attributes such as communication, collaboration, and ethical decision-making. However, before the introduction of Casper, admissions committees had limited ways to assess these critical non-academic competencies.

Traditional methods like personal statements were fraught with limitations, including bias and weak predictive validity – even before the rise of AI-generated content (Kulatunga-Moruzi & Norman, 2002).

Casper was developed as an online situational judgment test (SJT) to fill the lack of defensible and predictive measurements of these non-academic attributes. It presents applicants with real-world scenarios and prompts them to reflect and respond in either a written or verbal format. By evaluating competencies such as communication, empathy, ethics, problem-solving, and resilience, Casper provides a more structured and defensible assessment of the attributes essential for success in medicine.

Research has demonstrated that these competencies are not just desirable but are directly linked to better patient care. Studies show that strong doctor-patient communication improves health outcomes (Riedl & Schüßler, 2017) and that professionalism and ethical decision-making correlate with clinical performance, professional behaviour, and leadership potential.

By integrating Casper into their admissions processes, medical schools can identify applicants who will excel not just academically, but also as compassionate and effective physicians. These skills—such as empathy, ethical decision-making, and communication—are not only critical in medicine but also highly valued across various professions, from business and law to education and engineering.

There is a wide range of evidence that points to the effectiveness of Casper in assessing applicants’ non-academic skills. This includes research studies conducted by Acuity researchers, partners, and external researchers – many of which are published in peer-reviewed academic journals and presented at academic conferences.

Our Casper Technical Manual is freely available and provides a robust and comprehensive guide on the validity and reliability of the Casper test.