Become an MMI Rater

Do you want to help us assess future physicians? The OHSU School of Medicine Admissions Office is looking for volunteers to become raters of M.D. program applicants in the multiple mini interview (MMI).

Volunteers should be physicians (practicing or retired), clinicians, nurses, scientists or others with a connection to the health care field. We hope our volunteers have a strong interest in contributing to identifying future physicians. Experience in evaluations or testing situations would be ideal, but not essential.

The MMI is a series of short interviews with standardized scenarios and questions. These short interviews require the applicant to respond to a prompt that is often health-related, then to discuss this with a rater. Some scenarios have an applicant interact with an actor while a rater observes; other scenarios have an applicant complete a structured task with verbal instructions.  

"The MMI has allowed us to evaluate applicants using multiple lenses," said Robert Cloutier, M.D., assistant dean for admissions, OHSU School of Medicine. "And it permits a broad cross-section of the community to participate in the M.D. admissions process."

Help us spread the word about this volunteer opportunity to your colleagues and others in the Oregon area!

Commitment and Training

The MMI is very different from a traditional interview, and we want you to fully understand the process before volunteering. Each rater is required to attend a 90-minute training session prior to participation.

We ask that volunteers commit to a minimum of four sessions of rating the medical school applicants between September and March. Volunteers can select the days that work best for them. Each session is three and a half hours long and primarily on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings. Volunteers need to be present for the entire session. The scoring is completed during the session, and there is no preparation required ahead of time.

For additional information or to volunteer, please contact us.

Continuing Medical Education

OHSU School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. OHSU School of Medicine designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™.

About the MMI

In 2011, the OHSU School of Medicine joined a cohort of medical schools using this new tool in the M.D. admissions process.

The Oregonian described the MMI this way: applicants are “rigorously examined for their emotional intelligence: the ability to communicate with real people in real situations and with professional colleagues in complex care-giving scenarios. They’ll be observed by at least seven professionals in at least seven successive and unknowable situations, rated on how well they parse the challenge and then work through it with others in the room.”

This MMI process was first established by McMaster University and has now been adopted by most Canadian medical schools and by at least a quarter of U.S. schools. It is intended to replace the inherent bias of traditional one-on-one interviews, employed at many medical schools, in which judging across shared metrics in any consistent manner is difficult.