Casper produces a single combined score from your typed and video responses, rated by multiple human evaluators. You receive your result as a quartile ranking about one month after testing, while the programs you apply to get a more detailed percentile and z-score roughly two to three weeks after your test date.
What Casper Actually Measures
Casper is a situational judgment test used by medical schools, nursing programs, and other health professions programs to evaluate interpersonal and professional skills that grades and standardized tests don’t capture. Each scenario is designed to assess a mix of nine core competencies: collaboration, communication, empathy, fairness, ethics, motivation, problem solving, resilience, and self-awareness.
You won’t receive a separate score for each of these traits. Raters evaluate your responses holistically, considering how well you demonstrate these qualities across the full set of scenarios. The test includes both typed sections (where you read a prompt and type your answers) and video sections (where you respond on camera). Both formats feed into a single combined score.
How Raters Evaluate Your Responses
Every Casper response is scored by trained human raters, not an algorithm. Each scenario is evaluated by a different rater, which means no single person’s judgment shapes your entire score. This design reduces the impact of any one rater’s personal bias.
Raters are looking at the substance of your thinking: how you weigh competing values, whether you consider multiple perspectives, how clearly you communicate your reasoning, and whether your response reflects genuine engagement with the scenario rather than rehearsed or surface-level answers. Spelling and grammar are not part of the scoring criteria, though your responses do need to be clear enough for a rater to follow your reasoning. If typos make your answer hard to understand, that could indirectly hurt you, but minor errors won’t cost points on their own.
How Your Final Score Is Calculated
After individual raters score each scenario, your results are aggregated into a single combined score. Acuity Insights, the company behind Casper, does not publish the exact formula for how scenario-level ratings are combined or whether any scenarios are weighted differently. What they do confirm is that your typed and video responses are both factored into one final number.
That final score is then compared against everyone else who took Casper in the same test window and for the same program type. Your position relative to other test-takers determines your percentile ranking and quartile.
What You See vs. What Programs See
There’s an intentional gap between the information you receive and what admissions committees get.
As an applicant, you receive your quartile approximately one month after testing. Quartiles divide all test-takers into four equal groups:
- First quartile: 0th to 24th percentile (bottom 25%)
- Second quartile: 25th to 49th percentile
- Third quartile: 50th to 74th percentile
- Fourth quartile: 75th to 100th percentile (top 25%)
Programs receive more granular data. About two to three weeks after your test, schools on your distribution list get both your percentile ranking and a z-score. A z-score tells them exactly how far above or below the average your performance was, making it easy to slot into existing admissions rubrics alongside GPA, MCAT scores, and interview ratings. This level of detail lets programs distinguish between someone at the 51st percentile and someone at the 73rd, even though both fall in the third quartile from your perspective.
Why You Only Get a Quartile
Acuity Insights has explained this design choice as a balance between transparency and preventing applicants from making decisions based on small score differences. A quartile gives you a general sense of where you stand without encouraging you to fixate on whether you scored a 62nd versus a 67th percentile. The company also notes that many programs consider applicants from all quartiles and use Casper as just one piece of a larger admissions picture, so a lower quartile alone shouldn’t stop you from applying to a program that requires it.
That said, if you land in the first quartile, it’s worth being realistic about how competitive your overall application is for programs that weight Casper heavily. Some schools use it as a hard cutoff for interview invitations, while others treat it as a soft factor alongside everything else.
How Programs Use the Scores
There is no universal standard for how schools incorporate Casper results. Some programs set a minimum percentile threshold below which applicants are automatically screened out. Others fold the z-score into a composite admissions formula alongside academic metrics. A third approach treats Casper as a tiebreaker between otherwise similar candidates.
Because programs receive a precise z-score rather than a broad quartile, they can calibrate how much weight to give Casper relative to other application components. The score is delivered electronically through Acuity Insights’ platform, so there’s nothing you need to send manually. You simply select your target programs when you register for the test, and results are distributed automatically.
Timing and Retakes
Programs get your scores within two to three weeks of your test date. You see your quartile about a month out. If you’re applying to programs with rolling admissions or early deadlines, factor in that two-to-three-week processing window when choosing your test date.
Casper allows only one attempt per admissions cycle for a given program type. If you’re applying to both medical schools and nursing programs, those count as separate program types with separate tests. But you cannot retake the test within the same cycle hoping for a better score to send to the same set of schools. Your one result is the one that goes out.