Reading Time Notes: What Is Worth Writing Down

Some circuits hand you paper and a pen outside the door. Most candidates then do one of two things with it: write nothing at all, or attempt to draft an answer in shorthand and get two thirds of the way through the first sentence before the bell goes.

Both are waste. Notes in an MMI are not a script and they are not a memory aid for content you already know. They are a landing strip: a small set of marks on a page that let you restart your brain if it stalls thirty seconds in.

Why sentences fail and words work

Writing a sentence takes roughly ten times as long as writing the idea inside it, and it produces something you cannot use. Under pressure nobody reads a paragraph off a page mid answer. What people actually do is glance down for half a second and hope to catch a hook. A paragraph offers no hook. Four separated words offer four.

Sentences also do something subtler and worse. Once you have written a full line, you feel committed to saying it in that order, and your answer turns into a recitation that sounds nothing like a person thinking. Assessors can hear the difference easily.

The wider question of how to spend that window is covered in our piece on the thirty seconds of MMI reading time. This article is narrower: given that you have a pen, what goes on the page.

The four marks that earn their place

One: the task verb

Circle or copy the verb that tells you what you have been asked to do. Discuss. Decide. Explain. Apologise. Prioritise. Respond. Candidates misread prompts constantly, and it is almost never the scenario they get wrong, it is the instruction. A prompt asking what you would consider is not asking you to pick a side, and a prompt asking what you would do is not satisfied by a survey of considerations.

Two: the constraint

Almost every prompt contains one detail that narrows the whole thing: you are a first year student, not a doctor. The person is a friend, not a patient. It happened last week. You have not told anyone yet. Write it down in two or three words. This is the detail that separates a generic answer from one that is clearly about this scenario.

Three: two anchors

Two words that name the substance of what you want to cover. For an ethics prompt that might be autonomy and risk. For a personal prompt it might be the name of the story and the lesson. Two is the right number. One does not carry an answer, and four turns into a list you feel obliged to complete, which is how people run out of time on point three.

Four: the landing

Two or three words for where you want to end up. Not a full conclusion, just the destination: escalate and support, or tell her honestly, or defer to patient. Knowing your ending before you start is what allows you to finish cleanly when the timer surprises you, and a clean finish is disproportionately memorable to an assessor writing notes.

The page, in twelve seconds

That is a task verb, a constraint, two anchors and a landing. Six or seven words total, written down the left hand side with space between them so your eye can find any one of them in half a second. Write them big. Panic makes small handwriting unreadable to its own author.

You will have seconds left over. Spend them re reading the prompt rather than adding more words. The second read catches the clause you missed on the first, and that clause is where most misreads live.

What changes by station type

The shape holds, but the useful content shifts depending on what is behind the door:

• Ethics: the two values in tension, and who is affected other than the obvious person. Not the name of a framework, which you can produce without notes.
• Role play: who they are to you, what they are likely feeling, and your first line. Nothing else, because the rest has to come from them.
• Personal or motivation: the story you have chosen and the one word takeaway. Choosing fast matters more than choosing well here.
• Data or article: what it shows, one limitation, and the question you would want answered. Numbers only if you will genuinely quote them.
• Task station: the constraints only. Not the goal, which you will remember, but the rules you will forget the moment your hands start moving.
• Prioritisation: the items in the order you have chosen, so you can read them out and then justify them rather than reconstructing the list live.

The role play case is worth stressing. A planned second and third line become a script you will try to force onto a person who has said something you did not predict, and that is how role play stations go wrong. Write the opening, then plan to listen.

Using the page once you are inside

If you are allowed to carry your notes in, put the page down on the desk rather than holding it, so your hands are free and the paper does not shake. Glance, do not read. Two glances in a two minute answer is normal, six is a candidate reading aloud from a sheet, and it kills eye contact.

If a follow up question takes you somewhere the notes do not cover, abandon them entirely. The page was for the opening. Once the assessor is steering, it has done its job.

When there is no paper

Plenty of circuits give you no pen, and some remote formats put the prompt on screen with a countdown and nothing else. Formats vary by university and change between cycles, so check the university's current admissions page rather than assuming. When there is no paper, run the same four items in your head and say them silently in order. The structure is doing the work, not the ink.

Practising the note, not the answer

Here is a drill that takes ten minutes and improves more stations than another hour of full answers. Take a list of MMI questions used in Australia, give yourself thirty seconds per prompt, and write only the notes. Do fifteen in a row. Then go back and ask, for each one, whether those words would have got you started if your mind had gone blank.

You will find your own failure pattern quickly. Some people write beautiful content words and never capture the task verb. Others write the task and no substance. Fix the one you keep missing and the notes start working within a week.

Then test whether they hold under real conditions by running full timed stations with marking attached. MasterMed's AI interviewer scores you against a rubric rather than telling you it sounded good, and the first speaking station on the trial is free, no card required, with no automatic conversion.

Good notes are almost invisible in a strong answer. That is the point. Six words on a page that nobody else would understand, holding up two minutes of speech that sounds entirely unrehearsed.