Ulster University’s School of Medicine will not provide individual feedback to unsuccessful applicants, which is a departure from the overall University admissions policy.
This decision has been taken due to the high number of applications to the MBBS programme. The School does, however, recognise that unsuccessful applicants might wish to apply again in the future and would like to know how to strengthen their performance. We have, therefore, provided the following generic feedback on overall performance of candidates in the 2021 admissions cycle.
Multiple Mini Interviews - General Feedback
- The vast majority of applicants presented themselves in a professional manner.
- Applicants are expected to dress and behave in a professional manner; consistent with the expectations of working in the medical profession.
- The test session held on the morning prior to the MMIs proved vital in detecting and resolving a good number of IT issues. We appreciate those who made the effort to attend these sessions.
- The virtual format of the MMIs was new to the School also. It worked very well, and we thank all applicants for helping to make this admissions cycle of MMIs a success.
- We can reassure applicants that our MMI overall performed very well. It was very reliable, discriminating between applicants and had statistical properties that were very much in keeping with high quality MMIs published in the medical education literature.
Multiple Mini Interviews - Blueprint
Each MMI followed a specific blueprint and all the questions mapped to this consistently.
- Communication Skills - 1 question
- Initiative and Resilience - 1 question
- Insight and Integrity - 1 question
- Empathy - 1 question
- Teamwork - 1 question
- Organisation and Problem Solving - 1 question
- Preparation and Motivation for a Medical Career - 1 question
- Ethical and Moral Reasoning - 1 question
Where Candidates Performed Well
- MMI questions relating to 'Insight and Integrity’
- MMI questions relating to 'Teamwork’
- MMI questions relating to ‘Organisation and Problem Solving’
- MMI questions relating to ‘Ethical and Moral Reasoning’. This was surprising as this station is deemed challenging in the literature.
Where Candidates Performed Less Well
MMI questions relating to ‘Communication Skills’
Doctors are expected to have very well developed and advanced communication skills. It is imperative that applicants to the MBBS programme are aware of this and take steps to prepare and practice for scenarios requiring effective communication skills. These stations were the most discriminating and correlated maximally with overall applicant outcome.
MMI questions relating to ‘Empathy’
The MMI assessors commented that a significant number of applicants did not understand what empathy was, and how important it is for doctors to display this important non-cognitive domain.
MMI questions relating to ‘Preparation and Motivation for Medicine’
Specifically, a high proportion of applicants were not aware of the key features of our MBBS programme. We would expect potential applicants to have reviewed the School of Medicine website to ascertain these details.
We hope that this feedback is helpful, for unsuccessful applicants this year, and for those preparing for future applications. We must remind those who attended interviews in 2021 of the non-disclosure agreement that you signed prior to completing the MMIs and this still applies.