Running a Mock MMI With Friends

A mock MMI with friends is the closest thing to the real day that you can build for nothing. Multiple stations, multiple assessors, a clock, strangers' opinions, and the specific exhaustion of resetting your brain six times in an hour. Nothing you do alone reproduces that.

Most groups still get very little out of it, because they run it as a study session with a timer attached. People watch each other's stations, discussion breaks out between rounds, someone reads the prompts in advance, and by station three it is a conversation about how hard the questions are. The fix is entirely structural, and it takes about twenty minutes to set up.

What you need

• Three people minimum. Four to six is the sweet spot. More than eight and it becomes an event rather than practice.
• Separate rooms, or at least separate corners with distance between them. A library group study area, a common room, or someone's house with three closed doors all work.
• One person on the clock with a phone timer and something audible for the changeover.
• Printed prompts in envelopes, one per station, taped to the door. Printed matters: reading a prompt off a phone breaks the illusion immediately.
• A score sheet per station per candidate, printed, with space for written comments.
• Water, and somewhere for people to wait that is not within earshot of a station.

Roles, and why they must be fixed

Every station needs an assessor, some stations need an actor, and the whole circuit needs one timekeeper who does not also try to run a station. Write the roles down before you start. Groups that improvise roles end up with three people watching one candidate, which is both intimidating and useless.

The assessor's job is to say the opening line, keep quiet, write notes throughout, and score at the end. Not to help, not to nod encouragingly at good points, not to fill silences. Silence is data.

With three people

Run one station at a time in a rotating triangle: one candidate, one assessor, one actor or second assessor. Each round, everyone shifts one seat. Three rounds gives everyone one station as candidate, so plan for several cycles with different prompts.

With four to six

Now you can build a real circuit. Set up two or three stations in separate rooms, staff each one, and run candidates through them simultaneously. Half the group is candidates, half is staff, and you swap halfway. This is the version that actually reproduces the pressure of the day, because you never see the prompt before you are standing in front of it.

Timing

Use the timings your own interview actually uses. Circuit length, station length and reading time all vary between universities and can change from year to year, so check the university's current admissions page rather than copying a format from a forum. Our breakdown of how MMI scoring works in Australia covers what is typically being marked inside those minutes.

Whatever timings you choose, run them strictly. The bell goes and the candidate stops mid sentence, walks out, and moves to the next door. That abruptness is a real part of the experience, and practising it removes a genuine shock from the day. Keep the changeover short and silent, with no debrief between stations.

Writing the stations

One person should not write the whole circuit, because they will then be the only one who cannot be a candidate. Instead, everyone writes two stations in advance and nobody reads the others. Cover a spread rather than four ethics questions:

• An ethical dilemma with a genuine tension in it, not an obvious right answer.
• A roleplay with a person who is upset, worried or withholding something.
• A personal or motivational station, including the uncomfortable follow up questions.
• A teamwork or conflict scenario set somewhere ordinary: a group assignment, a casual job, a sports club.
• A health system or public issue prompt, ideally one that has been in Australian or New Zealand news.

For roleplay stations, write a separate actor brief that the candidate never sees: who you are, what you are actually worried about, and what makes you open up. Our guide to MMI roleplay stations explains how those scenes are built, and a hidden concern is the ingredient that makes them worth running.

Do not use lists that claim to be real or remembered questions from previous years. They are unverifiable, often invented, and universities change their stations. Writing your own is better practice anyway, because designing a station teaches you what one is testing.

The score sheet

Keep it simple enough that a nervous friend can complete it in ninety seconds. Four or five domains, each scored out of five, with two mandatory written comments: one thing that worked, one specific thing to change. Scores stop feedback being vague. Comments stop scores being meaningless.

Assessors write during the station, not afterwards from memory, and they hand the sheet over rather than reading it aloud. A written sheet you take home is worth far more than a warm summary delivered to your face by someone who likes you.

Rules that keep it honest

• Nobody watches a station they are not staffing. An audience changes everything and teaches you nothing useful.
• No talking about stations until the entire circuit is finished, including in the corridor and including by facial expression.
• Actors stay in character until the timer sounds, no matter how awkward it gets. Laughing mid scene destroys the round for everyone.
• Phones away, including the timekeeper's, except for the timer itself.
• Dress as you would on the day at least once. It feels absurd in someone's lounge room and it changes how the whole thing lands.
• Run the full circuit without a break, so you feel what station five is like when you are already tired.

The debrief goes at the end

When the circuit is over, hand out the sheets, give everyone five quiet minutes to read their own, then go round the group with one question each: what is the single thing you are changing before the next session. That is the whole debrief. Long group discussions about what the ideal answer would have been are enjoyable and mostly worthless.

Then run it again the following week with completely different prompts, and rotate who assesses whom. Repetition with new material is the point. A circuit you run once is an interesting afternoon.

Running it online

Breakout rooms replicate a circuit surprisingly well: the timekeeper moves candidates between rooms, each room is a station, and being dropped into a new room with a new face is close to walking through a door. If your real interview is online, this is the version to run. Our comparison of virtual and in person MMIs covers what to watch for in delivery, and recording the sessions gives you evidence your friends cannot provide from memory.

What a friend circuit cannot do

Your friends are at the same stage as you, share your blind spots, and want you to feel good afterwards. They also cannot mark consistently across weeks. Pair the circuit with something impersonal: MasterMed's live AI interviewer runs timed MMI stations and marks you against a rubric, so you get a stable reference point between sessions. The first speaking station is free on the trial, there is no card, and the trial does not convert by itself.

Used together they cover most of what you need. The circuit gives you unpredictability, fatigue and other people's reactions. The rubric gives you an honest baseline. Neither is enough on its own, and both are available to you well before your interview arrives.