MMI Interview: The Ultimate Guide (150 Sample Questions Included)

Shemmassian Academic Consulting

Learn the different types of MMI interview questions and how to answer them. Plus, 150 MMI interview questions and the complete list of medical schools that use MMI.

2 smiling doctors wearing white coats and a woman in a black blazer conducting an MMI interview

(Note: We encourage you to supplement this resource with our Med School Interview Question Bank, which includes over 230 of the most common traditional and MMI interview questions, including sample responses for each.)

Part 1: Introduction to MMI interviews

Part 2: What is the MMI?

Part 3: Types of MMI questions—and how to answer each type

Type 1: Ethical scenario questions

Type 2: Character development questions

Type 3: Teamwork questions

Part 4: How to prep for the MMI interview

Part 5: Frequently asked questions

Appendix A: Sample MMI interview questions

Appendix B: List of medical schools that use MMI interviews

Part 1: Introduction to MMI interviews

Medical school admissions is unlike any other admissions process in the world. Between the rigorous medical school requirements you have to complete before even applying and the countless essays you’ll write (e.g., personal statement, secondary essays), you’ll likely be exhausted by the time you finally hit send on your last applications.

But come fall or winter of your application year, it’s time to re-energize for interview season.

Medical school interviews come in a few different forms. You might have “traditional” interviews, where you’ll be asked about your professional and academic background, your strengths and weaknesses, why you want to go into medicine, etc.

You might also be subject to the multiple mini-interview, or MMI, which many medical schools are increasingly adopting as an alternative to the traditional one-on-one interview. Many applicants find the prospect of MMI interviews frightening—perhaps you’ve heard they involve role-play, pretending to be a real live doctor, working with actors, and solving complex biomedical questions on the spot.

But the MMI is actually beneficial for you as an applicant. MMI interviews allow schools to get a more holistic understanding of how you think. They can reveal your thought process, teamwork ability, and character traits—strengths and weaknesses alike.

In this guide, we’ll explain what the MMI is, what types of MMI interview questions you might run into, and how to succeed in different scenarios. We’ll review common pitfalls and discuss how you should approach MMI interview prep. By taking the time to understand and practice the skills covered in this guide, you’ll be well prepared to ace your MMIs.

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Part 2: What is the MMI?

The MMI, or multiple mini-interview, consists of a series of short interview stations that are independent of one another. Together, the 6–10 stations assess your capabilities in the following areas:

Crucially, you should think of the MMI interview as a way of assessing your thought processes and situational aptitude rather than content knowledge. In other words, you will not be asked to diagnose a patient based on symptoms or solve a medical mystery.

Different medical schools offer different numbers of stations and the questions they ask vary. You might find as few as 6 or as many as 10 stations. In general, you can count on most of the following information to be consistent across schools.

We’ll go in-depth into the nature of each type of station later on, but here’s a high-level summary to get you started. Each MMI station generally involves a chance to prepare for two minutes by reading the question/scenario. Once you enter the room where the station takes place, you’ll have eight minutes to provide your answer to the question or scenario to an interviewer/evaluator.

Some schools offer a break station where you will have ten minutes to relax in between interview stations. The entire process typically takes around two hours, but may take less time depending on how many stations there are.

(COVID-19 note: Many MMIs will be conducted in the format of an asynchronous video interview (AVI). This simply means you and your interviewer need not do the interview live. For instance, you might be asked to record your answers to predetermined questions.)

Why do schools use MMI?

Before you learn how to prepare for MMI interviews, you should understand why the MMI has come about, and why it’s increasingly popular. Many schools, such as Duke School of Medicine, UCSD School of Medicine, and University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, have transitioned to MMI-only interview formats or a hybrid format with both MMI and traditional, one-on-one interviews.

There are a few reasons for this shift:

  1. MMIs involve more than one interviewer. Schools want to see how multiple people interact with you, rather than basing their decision on the subjective opinion of just one interviewer.
  2. MMI interviews are more standardized, with rubrics for evaluation, which limits the subjective factors that may influence an admission decision, such as chemistry with the interviewer.
  3. MMIs offer an indication of how you behave rather than just inviting you to share your backstory. Medical schools hope that MMI interviews will let them better assess your teamwork and communication skills, maturity, empathy, situational responses, and overall thought process.

The shift can come with some drawbacks. You may feel more stressed about the MMI process because you need to impress many different evaluators in a day. You may also feel uncomfortable because MMI interviews are fast-paced or because they feel more like a test than a traditional interview setting where you can have a conversation with an evaluator.

If you’re concerned, try to think about the MMI format in this way: it works to your advantage to have many people working together to get a better picture of who you are as an applicant. Your admissions decision doesn’t rest on the subjective opinion of just one or two interviewers. If you underperform in one of two traditional interviews or simply don’t click with one of the interviewers, you might find yourself out of luck. But an MMI allows you more chances to impress.

Part 3: Types of MMI questions—and how to answer each type

MMI questions can be broken down into three main categories:

  1. Ethical scenarios (with or without acting)
  2. Character development (with or without acting)
  3. Teamwork

We’ll discuss how to succeed at each of these stations.

Type 1: MMI ethical scenario questions

Ethnical scenario questions—often the most stressful for applicants—are designed to test how you respond to a high-pressure and morally challenging situation. They’re not aimed to check whether or not your personal ethical compass is pointing true north. Rather, they’re meant to see how you process a difficult situation. Interviewers will ask themselves questions like:

You might be asked about scenarios that you’ll encounter in the future as a physician—a patient in a persistent vegetative state, for instance. But not every question has to do with healthcare. You could also be asked about scenarios that involve your role as a citizen or in personal relationships.

The University of Washington Department of Bioethics and Humanities runs an ethics in medicine website that's a valuable resource for gaining exposure to these varied issues. With topics like confidentiality and dealing with diverse beliefs, it can help you bolster your knowledge of potential ethical scenario questions for the MMI.

It is impossible to prepare for every potential question that you could run into during your interview, but you can follow a step-by-step process to ensure you have a strong framework for evaluating any situation an MMI might throw at you.

How to answer an MMI ethical scenario question

Here’s our suggested process:

Step 1: Brainstorm. You’ll have two minutes outside the interview room to consider what the prompt is trying to test you on.

We’ll go through many practice scenarios below, but here’s one we’ll follow as we explain the brainstorming process:

You are a physician who has been taking care of a 45-year-old Native American man who has three teenage children. He has been on dialysis for five years and is now in dire need of a kidney transplant. Fortunately, he is now near the top of the list and is called into the hospital for tests. He then decides to go home to partake in a healing ceremony, a tradition that is very important to him and his family, after hearing this great news; however, after he has left you receive word that a kidney has become available. What do you do?

Here’s how to think through the scenario during your brainstorming time:

  1. Identify the key factors that you need to think about in order to answer the question. Some prompts may be filled with extraneous information that is unnecessary to your answer or understanding of the scenario. You must be able to focus on what is most important in these situations. In the case above, the most important factors are:

The information that he is a long-term patient of yours, has three children, and was just at the hospital are unimportant to your understanding of the scenario.

In the case above, you could easily get stuck on the following issues:

Although all of these questions are important, the primary problem of this scenario can be determined by using the key factors discussed above. The primary problem boils down to this: What do you do if you tell your patient that a kidney is ready for immediate transplant but he refuses because he hasn’t participated in his healing ceremony yet?

Some follow-up thoughts that you may want to address after answering the primary question/follow-up questions that may be asked by your evaluator include:

Step 2: In the MMI. Once you’ve gotten inside the interview room, you can begin the actual process of playing out the scenario.

  1. Collect information. Now it’s time to either begin asking the actor in front of you questions, or, in the case of a non-acting scenario in which you cannot interact with an individual to gather more data, to make educated assumptions aloud. In the latter case, you will most likely have to include both sides of the situation, ultimately giving two different answers. In the example above, you might say: If I told the patient that a kidney was ready for immediate transplant and he refused, I would ask why? It is important to note that this is nonjudgmental and will just help me understand his thought process. After hearing his answer, I would do my best to educate him on why I believe he needs to come back to the hospital and get the transplant immediately. If he still refuses, I would then confirm that he understood everything that I said, so I know that he is making a well-educated decision on this important choice that he is making… (This is just a short excerpt of what your answer should look like. We’ll provide full-length answers later.)
  2. Makea decision. At the end of the day, you must make a decision as the “doctor.” Ambivalence will not do. The decision you make should fall between two different potential extremes, or in the grey zone when black and white answers are possibilities.

We will now jump into two full-length examples of how to apply this step-by-step process in answering practice questions, one acting and one non-acting.

MMI ethical scenario: acting example

Note that actors will have different demeanors depending on how a given school directs them to behave. Some actors might be rude or non-cooperative patients, whereas others will be pleasant and easy. Prepare yourself for both situations.

Here’s the prompt:

You are a pediatrician working in a small-sized community at a county hospital. Your second patient of the day is a 14-year-old girl whom you have taken care of since she was a young child. You know her parents very well. During her physical exam, her dad leaves the room. As you finish the exam and are about to call her father back in, she asks you for birth control pills. She requests that you do not tell her parents. What do you do?

Step 1: Identify key factors.

Key factors in this scenario include:

The first two should be considered in every situation. As a physician, your focus should always be on how to best take care of your patient while respecting their autonomy. But for this case, that first principle is complicated by age. If the patient was 18 or older, she would be considered an adult and able to make her own medical decisions without a parent’s consent.

So how will you navigate the balance between the patient’s autonomy and her age?

Step 2: Define the problem.

Here’s our primary question: Do I give a minor birth control pills without parental consent?

Below, we have italicized the parts of the prompt that are important; you should be doing this mentally for every prompt that you see before you enter the room and begin interacting with the actress.

You are a physician working in a small-sized community at a county hospital. Your second patient of the day is a 14-year-old girl who you have taken care of since she was a young child, and you know her parents very well. During her physical exam, her dad leaves the room. As you finish up the exam and are about to call her father back in, she asks you for birth control pills. Additionally, she requests that you do not tell her parents. What do you do?

After identifying the key factors in the question, the prompt is reduced to the following: You are a pediatrician, a 14-year-old girl asks you for birth control pills. She requests that you do not tell her parents. What do you do?

Step 3: Collect information.

Now that you’ve identified the key factors and defined the problem, it’s time to collect additional information pertaining to this specific situation

Because you’re in an acting scenario, you can ask questions. In fact, you should not make assumptions about the patient. Avoid sounding judgmental. Your goal is to find out more information while being supportive.

Here are some good questions to ask: