A guide for students · Winter of Year 13
MMI stations explained: what each one tests and how to practise
A multiple mini interview, or MMI, is a circuit of short stations, each with its own interviewer and task, which many UK medical schools and most dental schools use instead of one long interview. The Medical Schools Council describes seven to ten stations of three to ten minutes each, and each one is marked on its own, so a station that goes badly does not carry into the next.
How does an MMI circuit run?
You move round the stations in a timed circuit, usually with a short break between stations to read the instructions for the next one, and when the time is up you move on whether or not you have finished. The Medical Schools Council’s guide to running a mock MMI says real MMIs typically run rigidly to a schedule, that a whole MMI usually takes 60 to 90 minutes, and that you may be at the university for half a day. The interviewers can be lecturers, doctors, medical students or volunteers from the community.
The details differ from school to school, and each school says what its own circuit looks like. Birmingham, for example, describes six or seven stations of eight minutes, each including two minutes of preparation, held in person in Birmingham for Home applicants, with international applicants interviewed online. There is no feedback during a real circuit, which is the main way it differs from most mock ones.
What kinds of station are there?
The Medical Schools Council’s mock MMI pack sorts its stations into eight kinds, and most real circuits draw on the same themes: role-play, motivation, ethics, the NHS, communication, teamwork, data and calculation, and personal attributes. The table gives an example of each from the pack, which says its stations are examples of the kind used in MMIs and have not been piloted.
Whatever the station is about, the pack says every one also assesses communication: whether your answer has a logical structure with reasoning you can follow, and your tone of voice, eye contact and posture. So a station on the NHS is partly a test of whether you can explain two problems clearly and say why you chose them, and a calculation station is partly a test of whether you talk the interviewer through your working.
| Station | An example from the pack |
|---|---|
| Role-play | You borrowed a friend’s expensive camera and dropped it; explain what happened to the friend, played by an actor who is angry at first. |
| Motivation and commitment to medicine | Why medicine, why this university, and which parts of the course you think will be hardest. |
| Medical ethics | One liver and two compatible patients, or an elderly patient refusing an amputation when it is not clear he has capacity to decide. |
| Insight into the NHS and healthcare | The two biggest problems the NHS will face in the next 20 years, or a recent medical development explained to somebody who has not heard of it. |
| Communication skills | Explain vaccination with no jargon, then explain an injection to a five-year-old. |
| Teamwork exercise | Talk the interviewer through tying a shoelace without using your hands. |
| Data interpretation and calculation | Work out the volume of a drug solution from a dose per kilogram, or describe a graph of heart disease over time and suggest reasons for the trends. |
| Personal attributes | A time you failed or made a mistake and what you did afterwards, or a time you worked well in a team. |
How are stations marked?
In the Medical Schools Council’s pack each station has its own checklist of what a good answer does, and the interviewer also gives a global judgement out of five, from unsatisfactory to excellent. The difference between the middle and the top of that scale is mostly about prompting: a satisfactory answer completes the task with some prompting, a good or excellent one with very little, and an excellent one also reads as genuine rather than rehearsed.
The checklists are specific. For the role-play about a broken camera, the interviewer ticks whether you explain what happened and check the friend understands, stay calm when the friend is angry, show you understand their worries, and form a plan with them; the actor’s notes say that should happen without prompting. For the ethics stations there is no correct answer, and the marks go to weighing the reasons on each side, and to recognising that a doctor would not make the decision alone and would ask senior colleagues.
The pack deliberately gives no model answers, because many stations look for your own response and a copied phrasing tends to score worse. Each station is marked by a different interviewer, and as the pack puts it, the interviewer in the next room will not know how you have done so far.
Dentistry and veterinary medicine
Newcastle University’s careers service says all UK dental schools interview the applicants they shortlist and the majority use MMIs, and that manual dexterity may be tested, for example by asking you to thread a needle or to bring an example of your manual dexterity with you. Aberdeen’s dentistry MMI lists manual dexterity among the qualities it scores, with six-minute stations and about 90 minutes in all. Not every dental school uses MMIs: Bristol describes a structured interview of 45 to 60 minutes with four assessors.
Veterinary schools vary in the same way. Edinburgh’s veterinary school describes seven 10-minute stations, five with an interviewer (work experience, career exploration and what it means to be a professional, awareness of animal welfare, data interpretation, and a moral or ethical dilemma) and two without one: a practical task and a numeracy task without a calculator.
How to practise for an MMI
Practise out loud and against a clock, because the format is what catches people out: it is hard to judge four or eight minutes from the inside, and an answer that sounds fine in your head often runs out after one. The Medical Schools Council’s pack is written so that a teacher with no experience of medical admissions can run a mock circuit, with a timekeeper, an actor for the role-play and a mark sheet for each station, so it is worth asking a school or college to use it.
Prepare a few ideas rather than a script. The pack suggests the questions you can expect in some form, such as why you want to study medicine, why at that university, when you have shown teamwork, leadership or empathy, and a recent healthcare or science development you have read about, and it advises against rehearsed wording. Taking a breath before you answer gives you time to structure what you say, and if a station goes badly the best thing is to start the next one fresh.
With an account, cookie’s Interview prep runs a timed MMI circuit with an AI interviewer, which plays the actor in role-play stations, keeps to each station’s time and marks every station separately. It uses credits, and it is practice for beforehand, never something to have open during the real thing.
Current affairs without a list of headlines
Stations about the NHS or a news story are the ones people try to revise for with lists, and lists go out of date quickly: a named policy, a minister or a strike can change between your application and your interview. Birmingham’s advice is to keep up with medical issues in the news and to discuss and debate them with friends and family, which is more use than memorising.
A plain way to talk about any story is to say what happened, who it affects, what the trade-off is and what you would want to know before deciding, and then to give your own view. That is close to what the pack’s NHS station marks: two problems explained, why you chose them, some evidence, and a suggestion for what could be done about each.
Where to check
- Medical Schools Council: how to run a mock MMI
- Medical Schools Council: interviews
- University of Birmingham: medicine interviews
- University of Aberdeen: dentistry interviews
- Newcastle University careers: dental school interviews
- University of Edinburgh: veterinary medicine interviews
Checked against these on . The rules change from year to year, so the pages above are the ones to trust if anything here disagrees with them.
Common questions
How many stations are in an MMI?
The Medical Schools Council says normally seven to ten, each lasting three to ten minutes, but each school sets its own. Birmingham describes six or seven 8-minute stations, and Edinburgh’s veterinary school seven 10-minute ones.
What is a role-play station?
A station where you talk to an actor playing a friend, a patient or a relative, usually to explain something difficult or to calm somebody who is upset. In the Medical Schools Council’s examples you are marked on explaining clearly, checking they understand, staying calm, showing you understand their worries and making a plan with them.
How are ethics stations marked?
Usually there is no single right answer. The marks go to seeing the issues, weighing the reasons on each side, reaching a conclusion you can explain, and knowing that a doctor would involve senior colleagues and the patient’s family rather than decide alone.
Do all medical schools use MMIs?
No. Some use panel interviews, which the Medical Schools Council describes as two or more interviewers for around 20 to 30 minutes, and Oxford and Cambridge hold academic interviews about the subject. Each school’s own admissions page says which format it uses.
Can one bad station ruin an MMI?
Each station is marked separately by a different interviewer, who does not know how your other stations went, so one poor station does not decide the rest. How the station scores are combined, and with what else, is up to each school.