The University of Liverpool School of Medicine uses a multiple mini interview to assess their students for their medicine applications. They will use the MMI format for the 2023 to 2024 Medicine application cycle.
The University of Liverpool School of Medicine
During this interview, there will be seven individual stations. Each station is roughly six minutes in duration although the panel members do have a small discretion to digress. If you have answered really well or even if you are answering really poorly, they still have to use the allocated time of 6 minutes. In between each station there is a one minute break where you can gather your thoughts.
Experienced Doctor Insight
The university focuses on a particular aspect at each station: “Each station is usually testing a particular ability.”
“The common ones include your motivation to become a doctor in the UK, communication skills in working as a team, ethical scenarios, analytical skills, empathy or a caring attitude and your work experience together with volunteering within your personal statement.”
All universities tend to use a grading/numerical system to score your interview performance such as a scale based on five grades. These grades could be excellent, very good, satisfactory, weak and poor. This grading system results in what the answer is and how the student comes across.
Therefore a student for example may give a very good answer but the way it was delivered is poor and it is obvious that they have simply learned answers. In that case, they will probably get a grading such as poor or just about satisfactory.
The numerical scale is usually on a scale of zero to 10 and therefore the grading is based on that. If there are more than one interviewers at each station, the summation of scores is added up and an average figure is derived.
We also looked at success rates at Liverpool medicine interviews.
Liverpool Medicine Interview Success Rate
In general, approximately 1/3 of students who apply for medicine at Liverpool get rejected immediately whilst the other two thirds have a roughly 50 to 50% chance of being successful at the medical interview.
However in recent years the success rate has been as low as 30% due to the sheer number of students. So as a whole, you have a two in three chance of receiving an interview and at the interview you have one chance in three of getting a place
So parents always ask us what they can do for their son and daughter in order to increase their chances at the interview.
Our in-house doctor expert at University Expert gives the following advice if you have a Liverpool medicine interview coming up. Firstly, you should know your personal statement really well including any non-academic information that you supply.
Advice From The Medical Interview Experts
You should also be able to discuss any negative aspects of your personal statement. Quite often they are looking for insight into your own skills and limitations. An important part of Liverpool medicine interviews is your work experience.
Ideally, work experience should be in person rather than online courses. Within the work experience, you should be able to talk about how much exposure you did have to team working.
Also you need to gain insight into empathy, communication and ethics. Furthermore, they want to know that you learnt the necessary details/insights/observations and how these can be applied to your future career as a doctor.
You should appear extremely keen to studyat Liverpool University in that you know about the university itself. They will expect you to know about the course structure and how this core structure fits in with your own learning style.
The Liverpool School of Medicine also has a vast Students Union so they will want students to be active in this domain.
You should also read in full detail the statement given out by Liverpool University on the core values and attributes needed to study medicine. These should also fit in with the criteria of their work experience guidelines for students applying to medicine at Liverpool university. In recent years, due to changes within the NHS, you may be asked to describe the structure of the NHS and what you know about the different primary, secondary and tertiary care routes for patients.
At some point with your interview in University of Liverpool, you can be asked to elaborate why you chose medicine and why you are suited for this career. These questions can be disguised as Why have you chosen to study medicine, what other careers did you consider as well as medicine and why not dentistry / pharmacy / nursing / physiotherapy?
- How do you feel the course structure at Liverpool and why is this suited for you?
- Are there any aspects which may not suit you as well?
Why did you decide to apply to Liverpool School of Medicine is a universal question.
Liverpool University also wants you to have extracurricular activities that you have done for an extended length of time. They would rather you have played tennis for your team for five years rather than something you’ve only done for two weeks.
Within your extracurricular activities, they want to know that you worked as a team, you took responsibility, you acted ethically and honestly and you are also self driven. The ethical scenario is one of the stations at every Liverpool medicine University interview.
Ethical Scenario Choices
Here you may be asked questions on ethics or even given an ethical scenario.
Our university expert in-house specialist doctor also advises applicants that the panel members can have some range of discretion in how they can progress from a particular question.
This is also to make sure that students are not just learning answers by rote fashion.
Liverpool medicine University MMI typically also has an analytical station. This could be a question relating to certain information and how you derive conclusions.
A common one that universities like to use involves administering the correct dosage of a drug for a particular patient.
The questions at analytical MMIs are not really designed to test A level maths skills but really to see if you can use basic maths in a stepwise fashion.
While we spoke to one of our tutor panel members, she mentioned how students do not even pause when answering but as soon as the interviewer has asked the question, they immediately answer the question. Even worse, the answer is to what they think the interviewer asked rather than the actual question. Therefore always have a pause and think about what the actual question is. Also ask yourself what are they actually testing for specifically?
Sometimes they can give scenarios and it is important that you give an overall balanced view before you give your definitive viewpoint. The interview itself is very intense and you need to be quite alert. It is always better to give a few well worded points to a question rather than giving a huge, long list. Once again they are looking to see whether you can decipher information appropriately.
Answering Medical Work Experience Questions
When you answer questions on your work experience, try to use examples and how you personally learned from them and observed. Try not to use too much complex medical terminology as this gives the wrong impression to the panel. It’s really important that you speak calmly and confidently and the only way to do this is to practice before your day of the interview. Get evidence from different members of family and friends on how you are answering questions.
If necessary, you can always book a free initial chat with one of our in-house experts or you can even book a mock interview with us. Just call us directly or fill in the contact form.
University Of Liverpool School Of Medicine Interview Insights
The University of Liverpool School of Medicine also wants to know if you come across as somebody who genuinely wants to study medicine or not somebody who has just been forced into it.
Although it sounds obvious, try not to answer too quickly or too slowly. In Liverpool medicine interviews, the questions which can occur are those involving certain elements of medicine such as the issue of confidentiality, consent, integrity, General Medical Council and the NHS. We always recommend that you have a good general knowledge of overall news items but in particularly health related news articles as well.
If you have mentioned an article or a book within your personal statement, they can easily ask you about this. They will of course expect you to know about it and poorly performing students or those who start stuttering won’t be successful.
Typical Medical School Interview Questions
Let’s look at some questions that you should be comfortable in answering at The University of Liverpool School of Medicine interview circuits.
- What are the challenges that the NHS will face in 10 years time?
- Would you tell us what you understand is a multidisciplinary team?
- Can you tell us a time when you failed and how you dealt with it?
- Why have you decided to study medicine?
- Why have you decided to apply to Liverpool School of Medicine?
- As an icebreaker station, they usually ask “tell us about yourself?”
- An additional icebreaker question is also when they ask you in general terms what you do in your spare time.
- What are the important qualities that a doctor requires?
- What are the difficult aspects of studying medicine?
- Can you tell us what you learnt in your work experience?
- Can you tell us something other than medicine related topics that you recently read in the news?
- How do you relax away from your studies?
- Tell us about a role that you had as a leader and what you learned from it?
- What has been your most important achievement so far?
- Can you tell us about your strengths and weaknesses?
- How do you think you might cope with an exam coming up and you haven’t carried out enough revision for it?
- What are the significant challenges doctors faced during the pandemic?
- What do you think are significant medicine advancements in the next five years?
- We have a large question bank of questions and we use these in our mock coaching interview practice for students.
Book a Mock Practice Interview
If you would like to book a mock interview or you simply want an initial chat on the phone with us, you can contact us using the contact form or you can simply call us directly on 07891414224 here at University Expert