The same Casper Test you may remember from medical school. A higher bar. And a remarkable number of qualified doctors who underestimate it. Here's why — and what assessors are actually scoring.
Of every selection step in Australian medical training, the RACGP Casper Test produces the most consistently surprised candidates. Doctors who have practised for years, who are technically excellent, who have passed every clinical exam in front of them, sit down to Casper expecting it to be the easiest part of their AGPT application. It rarely is.
I have coached medical school Casper candidates for years and now coach doctors through RACGP and FSP entry. The pattern is consistent. The skills that make you a competent junior doctor overlap with the skills the Casper Test is marking, but they are not the same skill set. Assuming they are is the most common mistake at this level — and the most expensive one, given the AGPT cycle runs once a year.
This guide explains what the RACGP says the test assesses, what assessors are actually scoring under that surface description, and why doctor-level experience is necessary but not sufficient. It is written for first-attempt applicants and for doctors returning after a near-miss. There are no leaked scenarios, no NDA-breaching specifics, and no recycled marketing claims.
You will not find leaked scenarios, station-by-station timing tables, or any content that would breach Acuity Insights' terms or the RACGP's selection rules. Other prep providers do leak this kind of material. They are doing you a disservice — and the colleges know who they are. What this guide gives you instead is the philosophy and reasoning that determines whether your responses score, which is far more useful for an assessment that never repeats the same scenario twice.
The RACGP's own description of the assessment, on its National Entry Assessment page, is worth reading carefully because it disposes of several myths in two paragraphs.
The selection assessment for AGPT and the Fellowship Support Program is, in the RACGP's own words, an online situational judgement test delivered by Acuity Insights and referred to by them as the Casper Test. It evaluates a candidate's ability to reflect on and respond to interpersonal and professional dilemmas using critical reasoning and social interpretation. It measures nine competencies — collaboration, communication, empathy, fairness, ethics, self-awareness, resilience, problem-solving and motivation.
The next sentence is the one most candidates skim past, and it is the most important sentence on the entire RACGP page:
That sentence is doing a lot of work. It tells you, directly from the college, that everything you know about acute management, pharmacology, differentials, guidelines, and clinical reasoning will not score you a single point in this test. It also tells you, by implication, that the doctors who walk in expecting to be assessed on their clinical performance — the way every other postgraduate medical exam has assessed them — are walking in expecting the wrong test.
I have lost count of the number of doctors who have told me, after their first attempt, some version of the same sentence. "I thought it would be easier than medical school CASPer because I'm a doctor now."
The reasoning is intuitive. You have years of experience. You have had thousands of conversations with patients. You have made decisions under pressure that medical students never have to make. Surely all of that scores.
It does — but only when you bring the right skill to the surface. The problem is that the skills clinical work develops are not always the skills Casper rewards.
Speed, decisiveness, action. Years of ward work train you to triage fast, decide, and move. You learn to give clear plans and to do it efficiently. You learn to write the minimum that conveys the decision.
Reflection, nuance, articulated reasoning. Casper rewards candidates who pause, weigh competing considerations honestly, articulate why they are choosing what they are choosing, and acknowledge the people in the scenario as people rather than problems.
If you have been a junior doctor for two or three years, your default writing voice has been trained on clinical notes — terse, action-oriented, decisional. That voice is exactly wrong for Casper. The test is asking a different question of you, and you need a different voice to answer it.
The nine competencies the test measures are unchanged from medical school Casper. Collaboration, communication, empathy, fairness, ethics, self-awareness, resilience, problem-solving, motivation. Same nine.
What changes is the depth of response expected at each one. A medical student writing about how they would handle a conflict with a colleague is being assessed against the standard of someone who might one day be a safe doctor. A qualified registrar writing about the same scenario is being assessed against the standard of someone who is supposed to be a future GP — independent, autonomous, accountable for their own patients in primary care from day one.
That shift cascades into every response.
Notice that none of these require new content. The competencies are the same as they were in medical school. The difference is what counts as a passing answer at each one.
From coaching doctors through this test, three patterns repeat themselves enough to be worth naming directly.
The RACGP says the test does not assess clinical knowledge. It says this in two languages — once explicitly, and once by implication when it lists the nine competencies, none of which are "clinical reasoning". And yet doctors, especially under time pressure, default to the answer they know best, which is the clinical one.
A scenario set in a clinical environment is not a clinical scenario. It is an interpersonal or ethical scenario that happens to be wearing scrubs. The doctor who answers the clinical question — what would I prescribe, what differentials would I consider, what is the next investigation — has answered the wrong test. The doctor who answers the human question — what is the person across from me feeling, what do they need from me right now, how do I weigh competing duties of care — has answered the test the RACGP is actually setting.
Junior doctors are trained to be fast. The Casper Test punishes that training, hard. Quick answers tend to be shallow answers. Decisive answers tend to be unreflective answers. The candidate who pauses for the first ten seconds of their typed response window, considers what is actually being asked of them, then writes a slower but more thoughtful response, will outscore the candidate who fires three quick paragraphs of professional-sounding content.
Speed is not a competency on the rubric. Reflection is. That tells you which one to invest in.
Casper is not graded on prose quality. Polished sentences without genuine reflection score lower than fumbled sentences with genuine reflection. Doctors with strong written communication often spend their preparation time refining their phrasing, when the highest-value preparation is refining what they are actually thinking about. The test is not assessing whether you can write well. It is assessing whether you reason well.
Most preparation for this test is wasted on the wrong things. The standard advice — practise hundreds of scenarios, read every available rubric, memorise frameworks — is the equivalent of doing a thousand bench presses to prepare for a marathon. Volume in the wrong domain is not training.
Here is what actually moves the needle, in roughly the order that matters.
Notice what is not on this list. Memorising the nine competencies as a checklist. Drilling rubrics. Doing 200 timed scenarios with no feedback. Buying a course bundle with thousands of mock questions. These activities feel like preparation but rarely change a Casper score.
If you are reading this because you are also applying to ACRRM, the rural-generalist college, the relevant guide is different. ACRRM uses an MMI-format interview rather than Casper for selection. The principles for college-level MMI are covered in detail in the MMI guide for Australian medical applicants, including a dedicated section on specialist and college MMI. The same examiner mindset applies — empathy, communication, real-world reasoning, defensibility — but the format is different and the preparation looks different.
Applying to RACGP (AGPT or FSP): You sit the Casper Test. This guide.
Applying to ACRRM: You sit an MMI. See the MMI guide.
Applying to both: Both. The underlying skills overlap heavily — empathy, ethics, communication, self-awareness — but the format and rhythm of preparation differ.
I take a small number of doctors through Casper preparation each cycle. The work is unlike anything I do with medical school applicants — not because the test is different, but because the candidates are. Doctors come in already articulate, already experienced, already capable of giving polished answers. The job of coaching is not to teach them how to communicate. It is to help them notice the specific places where their hard-won clinical instincts are pulling them in the wrong direction for this test.
Concretely, that means sitting with their written responses, pointing out where the clinical voice has crept in, where the registrar instinct toward decisive action has displaced reflection, where a generic professional answer has replaced a specific human one. Then doing that again. Then doing that under time pressure. Then doing it cold.
It is closer to writing-coaching than test-coaching. Most doctors find it genuinely useful regardless of the Casper outcome — the same skills make for better difficult-conversations, better clinical letters, better feedback to juniors. Casper is the assessment that surfaces them.
If you remember nothing else from this guide, remember this:
The RACGP Casper is the same Casper Test you may have taken at medical school. Same platform, same nine competencies, same response formats. The bar is higher because you are a doctor now, not because the test is harder. Your job is to bring registrar-level reflection, multilateral empathy, and considered ethical reasoning to the same nine competencies you were assessed on years ago.
Every other prep strategy is downstream of getting that mindset right. Get it right, and the technical practice falls into place. Get it wrong, and no amount of mock questions will save you.