The Casper Test for UK Medical Schools: 2026 Guide

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5. The Casper Test for UK Medical Schools

For 2026/27 entry, exactly two UK medical schools use the Casper test — Kent and Medway Medical School (KMMS) and Three Counties Medical School at the University of Worcester — and neither requires it from every applicant. Casper (Computer-Based Assessment for Sampling Personal characteristics) is a separate online situational judgement assessment built and delivered by the Canadian company Acuity Insights, formerly branded Altus Suite, and it is entirely distinct from the Situational Judgement Test (SJT) built into the UCAT itself. This guide sets out precisely who is asked to sit Casper, at which two schools, under what thresholds, the current 2025/26-updated test format, and which five other UK medical schools piloted Casper between 2021 and 2024 and no longer use it.

Which UK Medical Schools Require the Casper Test in 2026?

Casper reached UK undergraduate medicine for the first time in 2021, when Kent and Medway Medical School began using it in a limited capacity. A wider, NHS England-funded pilot then ran through the 2023/24 admissions cycle across five medical schools: Anglia Ruskin University, Aston Medical School, Brunel Medical School, Kent and Medway Medical School, and Three Counties Medical School at Worcester. Participation in that pilot was voluntary and, at Aston and Brunel at least, explicitly did not affect admissions decisions. Four cycles on, only two of those five schools have kept Casper as a genuine part of selection for 2026/27 entry — and only for specific applicant groups, not for every candidate.

Because this list shifts most years — Health Education England's functions transferred into NHS England in 2023, and the original five-school pilot has already shrunk to two — always verify directly against KMMS's own Casper admissions test page and Worcester's Casper test page before assuming a school's 2023/24 pilot participation still applies. For a full academic and UCAT profile of a specific medical school, see our Anglia Ruskin medical school guide.

Is Casper Relevant to International Applicants to UK Medical Schools?

Yes — and for two of the groups most likely to encounter it, more than for standard home school-leavers. At KMMS, Casper is specifically triggered for Group E: international applicants with overseas fee status. It is also triggered for Group C, which includes candidates with Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, home-educated or international qualifications that KMMS cannot contextualise against English school performance data, and for Group D, all graduate applicants regardless of where they studied for their first degree — a route that a large proportion of international medicine applicants use after an undergraduate science degree. At Worcester, any shortlisted graduate-entry applicant can be asked to sit Casper irrespective of nationality, since Three Counties Medical School is a graduate-entry-only programme.

For international candidates, the practical logistics differ from most UK-specific admissions tests. Casper is delivered entirely online through Acuity Insights' own platform rather than at a fixed test centre network, so there is no need to travel to a UK Pearson VUE-style centre — you sit it from any location with a laptop or desktop, a working webcam and microphone, and a stable internet connection, after verifying identity with a government-issued photo ID. The trade-off is that UK sittings are more limited than in North America: where Canadian and US applicants can typically choose from several dates every month across an extended cycle, UK-specific test slots are comparatively sparse, so international applicants who are told they need to sit Casper should register for the earliest available slot rather than waiting, since late-cycle scores can arrive after a school's internal deadline for that admissions round. Time zone planning also matters more for international candidates: video-response scenarios are unforgiving of a slow or unfamiliar connection, so it is worth doing a full test-platform check well before your actual sitting rather than on the day itself. Because Casper assesses professionalism, ethics, communication style and self-awareness through scenarios written for a UK/NHS professional context, international applicants whose prior education did not involve explicit training in structured ethical reasoning or patient-facing communication often benefit from more preparation time than home applicants who have completed NHS work experience or a UK-based EPQ on a healthcare topic.

What Format Does the Casper Test Take?

Under Acuity Insights' own current specification, updated for the 2025/26 cycle onwards, Casper is built from 2 response sections and 11 scenarios in total. The video section presents 4 scenarios, each followed by 2 open-ended questions answered on camera with 1 minute allowed per response and an optional 30-second reflection period beforehand. The typed section presents 7 scenarios, each followed by 2 open-ended questions that must be answered within 3.5 minutes combined. Total testing time, including an introduction and two optional breaks, runs 65 to 85 minutes. This is a meaningful change from the format still described on some UK medical schools' own pilot-era pages — Aston's own Casper page, for instance, still describes "12 sections: 8 video-based and 4 word-based scenarios" with "3 probing questions in 5 minutes or less," which reflects the format used during the 2023/24 NHS England pilot rather than the current specification. Applicants preparing for Casper at KMMS or Worcester should work from Acuity Insights' current published format rather than an archived UK pilot description.

How Is Casper Different From UCAT's Situational Judgement Test?

This is the single most common confusion among UK medicine applicants, and getting it wrong wastes preparation time. Casper and the UCAT's own Situational Judgement Test (SJT) section are built by different organisations, sat under different conditions, and used by a completely different set of medical schools. The UCAT SJT is compulsory: it is one of the four scored/banded sections inside the UCAT itself, which is required by all 42 UCAT Consortium universities offering medicine or dentistry, and every single applicant to those courses sits it as part of their two-hour UCAT session, months before applying. The UCAT SJT presents 69 questions across a fixed set of clinical and professional scenarios, taken in 26 minutes, machine-scored and reported not as a number but as a Band from 1 (excellent judgement, closely matching the expert panel) to 4 (judgement differing substantially from the ideal response).

Casper, by contrast, is an entirely separate assessment from a different organisation — Acuity Insights, a Canadian company that also builds Duet and Snapshot — used by only two UK medical schools, and only for specific applicant groups at each. It is sat later in the cycle, after an applicant has already been shortlisted or flagged into a particular applicant group, not before applying. It uses open video and typed responses rather than fixed-choice questions, is rated by trained human raters rather than machine-scored, and is reported as a quartile ranking rather than a Band. A strong UCAT SJT Band 1 result says nothing about how a candidate will perform on Casper, and vice versa — the two should be prepared for separately, using each provider's own current official materials.

For UCAT preparation specifically, see our dedicated UCAT admissions test hub and UCAT tutoring service, and our detailed guide to UCAT score requirements across UK medical schools.

Who Must Sit Casper at Kent and Medway Medical School?

KMMS divides every applicant into one of five groups, and only three of those groups may be asked to sit Casper. Group A (pre-A-level or IB students at English schools with usable contextual data) and Group B (post-A-level or final-year undergraduates from the same background) are not asked to sit Casper at all — they proceed through UCAT threshold screening and school-performance contextualisation only. Group C (candidates without English school data, including Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, home-educated and international-qualification applicants), Group D (all graduate applicants, regardless of degree subject or where they studied) and Group E (international applicants with overseas fee status) may require the additional online assessment, which was Casper in the 2025-6 cycle. For 2025-6, KMMS's provisional UCAT threshold was a total score of 2,490 or above (the 47th centile), combined with an SJT band of 3 or above for Groups A and B, or band 2 or above for graduate applicants — though KMMS is explicit that it "does not necessarily commit to the same, or similar threshold" in future cycles, so the exact 2026/27 figure should always be confirmed on KMMS's own entry requirements page before relying on last year's number.

Crucially, KMMS uses Casper only to help rank eligible candidates for interview invitation — there is no published pass or fail mark. Selection then proceeds to Stage 3: Multi-Station Mini Interviews, roughly six stations of seven minutes each plus a 40-minute group station for in-person candidates (a different remote format applies to international applicants), with offer decisions made in batches from January through May. Interview invitations for candidates who sat Casper begin from the end of November. For general MMI preparation once you've cleared this stage, see our MMI interview coaching and medical school MMI interview guide.

Does Three Counties Medical School (Worcester) Require Casper for All Applicants?

No — Three Counties Medical School only requires Casper from applicants who have already cleared its initial shortlisting stage for the graduate-entry MBChB. Applicants apply through UCAS by the standard 15 October deadline, are screened on academic record together with either a GAMSAT or a UCAT score (Worcester allows either route), and are only then told individually whether they are eligible to sit Casper. Worcester's own published admissions FAQ states that most shortlisted applicants score more than 50 out of 73 on GAMSAT, or more than 1,870 (of a stated maximum 3,020) on UCAT — GAMSAT scores remain valid for two years, UCAT scores for one. If an applicant has already sat an England-specific Casper sitting earlier in the same admissions cycle for another purpose, Worcester notes that the score may be reusable via Acuity Insights rather than requiring a second sitting. Because Casper dates are controlled entirely by Acuity Insights rather than the university, Worcester is explicit that it cannot reschedule a Casper sitting itself — only the subsequent interview stage has any flexibility for exceptional circumstances. This makes Three Counties one of only two UK medical schools where a graduate-entry applicant should expect a genuine, outcome-relevant Casper sitting as a normal part of the 2026/27 cycle, alongside our broader guide to graduate entry medicine in the UK.

Which UK Medical Schools Piloted Casper But No Longer Use It?

Five UK medical schools took part in the NHS England-funded Casper pilot during the 2023/24 admissions cycle, and it is worth naming all five because most competitor content still treats "UK Casper schools" as a single, static list rather than one that has already shrunk by 60%. Anglia Ruskin University piloted Casper in 2023/24 alongside its A100 programme but does not currently list it as an admissions requirement. Aston Medical School's own Casper page confirms the test was "not mandatory," framed as part of a "national admissions pilot," with results explicitly not influencing decisions and a straightforward opt-out. Brunel Medical School ran the pilot with a fee-waiver code that made the test free for its applicants, and its own page states taking Casper "does not confer any advantage" over applicants who skip it. Beyond the five NHS England pilot schools, admissions-preparation providers also report that Swansea University Medical School and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) trialled Casper in earlier cycles; neither currently lists it as part of selection on its own admissions pages, so this should be treated as historical context rather than a live requirement. The practical takeaway for applicants: a school's participation in the 2021–2024 pilot period is not evidence that Casper still matters for a 2026/27 application — only KMMS and Worcester currently do.

How Much Does Casper Cost and When Are the 2026 Test Dates?

Acuity Insights charges a base testing fee plus a separate fee for each programme your score is distributed to, with all fees confirmed as "final," non-refundable and non-transferable between admissions cycles on the company's own help centre. Exact current pricing is set on Acuity Insights' own dates-and-fees portal and varies by test version and cycle rather than being fixed in GBP publicly, so applicants invited to sit Casper by KMMS or Worcester should check the fee shown at the point of booking their specific test version — Worcester's own registration guidance references a distinct "UK Graduate Professional Health Sciences" test code, which is priced separately from the standard North American version. During the 2023/24 NHS England pilot specifically, the test was funded centrally and free to applicants at participating schools, including via Brunel's fee-waiver code — that funding arrangement does not automatically apply to the current KMMS or Worcester requirement. On timing, UK sittings are considerably sparser than North American ones: where US and Canadian applicants can typically choose from several dates most weeks, UK-relevant sittings typically run to roughly one to three dates per month between July and December, with registration closing three days before each sitting — so an applicant invited to sit Casper should book the earliest available slot in their cycle rather than waiting, since late sittings can miss a school's internal processing deadline.

How Should You Prepare for the Casper Test?

Casper explicitly requires no content study — there is no syllabus to revise, unlike the UCAT or a subject-specific admissions test. What separates a strong Casper performance from a weak one is structured, calm, professional reasoning delivered under a hard time limit, across scenarios covering collaboration, ethics, problem-solving, resilience, communication and self-awareness. The most effective preparation is timed practice under realistic conditions: full mock sittings using both the video and typed-response formats, since many applicants who are confident writing under time pressure are visibly less comfortable answering on camera with only a 30-second reflection period, and vice versa. Because Casper is rated by trained human raters rather than scored by algorithm, responses that show clear structure — acknowledging the complexity of a scenario, weighing more than one perspective, and reaching a considered, professional conclusion rather than a snap judgement — consistently score more strongly than fast, confident answers that jump to a single conclusion. Applicants invited to sit Casper for KMMS or Worcester should also re-read the exact eligibility group that triggered the invitation (KMMS Group C, D or E, or Worcester's graduate-entry shortlist), since the scenarios and the professional context they're set in are designed around UK/NHS practice regardless of an applicant's educational background.

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