Level up your admissions with Casper, the most-widely used Situational Judgment Test in higher education
Predict success
Assessing intangibles and soft skills like communication, resilience and ethics alongside academic measures helps you find candidates who are more likely to excel in-program and beyond.
Optimize admissions
Save time and resources by selecting the best candidates early in the admissions process, using defensible, holistic data that’s more reliable than personal statements or reference letters.
Widen admissions pathways
Find high-potential applicants who might otherwise be overlooked and make your admissions process more fair than if your process relied on traditional measures of academic success.
How Casper works
Holistic & defensible admissions
By adding Casper scores to their evaluations, admissions teams get a more holistic, yet defensible assessment of each applicant than relying solely on traditional selection tools like GPA, knowledge-based exams or letters.
Authentic applicant responses
Casper uses a unique, open, video and text response format, leading to more authentic, in-the-moment responses. Candidates can justify their reasoning, express their values, and share their individual perspectives and experiences.
Soft-skill assessment
Applicants are scored on traits and skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, ethics, empathy, and self-awareness
Key features
Designed by experts
Casper content is built with extensive research by data scientists and psychometricians in collaboration with a diverse group of subject matter experts and applicants.
Online & easily accessible
Casper can be taken anywhere, as long as the applicant has access to a laptop and good internet connection. It takes 90-110 mins to complete, with breaks.
Multiple, trained raters to reduce bias
Each test is rated by multiple independent raters, with a different rater for each scenario. The final score is an average of all raters’ unique impressions, reflecting diverse perspectives on the applicant’s performance.
What makes Casper different?
Backed by 20 years of research and evidence
Casper was developed by the admissions team at McMaster University, to measure applicants’ non-academic abilities. Acuity Insights’s team of psychometricians and data scientists partner with programs and peer researchers to continually validate and quality-check Casper.
Most fair format for high-stakes decisions
Peer-reviewed research shows that open-response formats, like Casper’s, have much smaller demographic differences in scores than multiple-choice SJTs. They also reduce an applicant’s ability to “fake good” or be coached to answer “correctly.”
Complementary value-alignment assessment
When you choose to use Casper for your admission process, you also get access to Duet. Duet is our standardized value-alignment assessment that helps programs and applicants understand if they’re a match, based on objective and reliable data.
In our pilot study…those who had excelled on the Casper assessment generally secured more favorable placements and remained actively engaged alumni, demonstrating not only commitment to their respective programs, but also active involvement in their broader community.
Dan Shaw , MBA Program Director, Dalhousie Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University
Our data on Casper’s predictive validity clearly shows that there are benefits to using Casper in the admissions process…we think it could potentially help us determine the best candidates to invite to interviews after secondary applications.
Dr. Stacey L. Fanning, PhD , Assistant Professor and Course Director of Immunology, Department of Basic Biomedical Sciences, Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine
I think we’ve finally got a process that works for us. I’m much more confident in the quality of students we’re bringing into the program and Casper plays a huge role in that. Without a doubt, other programs would benefit by using it too.”
Thomas Morgan , Assistant Professor and Director of Admissions, The School of Physician Assistant Practice at Florida State University
Created by a university, for colleges & universities
Used by
150K+
Applicants take Casper
each year
Partnered with
500+
Partner programs around the globe
Case Study
Holistic Admissions in the Lone Star State: How Texas A&M College of Medicine uses Casper to support their diversity mission, without considering race or ethnicity
Join the hundreds of institutions who use Casper
Frequently Asked Questions
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-facing website.
No. Everything they need to take Casper is available to them in their Acuity Insights account on our applicant-facing 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.
