Casper is an open-response, soft-skills assessment, and it’s the most widely used situational judgment test (SJT) in higher education admissions worldwide. Backed by nearly 20 years of research, it assesses social intelligence and professionalism in a standardized way, and is used to identify applicants who are more likely to be successful in their program.

The Casper scores provide a valid and distinct measure of 10 aspects of social intelligence and professionalism, which can be easily incorporated into your existing admissions process.

Casper assesses the ability to effectively reflect on and communicate responses to interpersonal and professional dilemmas using critical reasoning and social interpretation.

Casper measures 10 competencies: collaboration, communication, empathy, equity, ethics, self-awareness, resilience, professionalism, problem solving and motivation. These competencies are important for both academic and professional success in all disciplines.

Casper is rated by human raters who represent the community that students will serve when they graduate. We have a growing and diverse pool of raters that number in the hundreds. All our raters are carefully selected and undergo extensive training, including implicit bias.

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

Each response of an applicant is rated by a different human rater, all of whom have gone through extensive training. Casper results are provided to partners as a single z-score, while applicants receive their quartile score.

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

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 equity.

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.