How do I prepare for an MMI in two weeks?

To prepare for an MMI in two weeks, split it cleanly. Week one is solo work: speak answers out loud against a timer across all four station families, three or four a day, recording yourself and watching each one back once. Week two is circuits: full runs of several stations back to back with a real person who tells you what they heard, not what you meant. Confirm your own school’s format first, because UBC publishes 10 in-person stations and Manitoba publishes a virtual MMI for the 2026-2027 cycle, and those are different days to prepare for.

Week one: build the spoken answer

The point of week one is to stop your mouth from being the bottleneck. Most applicants have thought about medicine for years and have never once said any of it out loud to a stranger under a clock.

Days one and two. Write out three answers in full: why medicine, a failure, and a time you disagreed with someone. Then close the document and never read them again. This is scaffolding, not script.

Days three to five. Three spoken answers a day against a timer, one from each of the other station families: situational, policy, and about you. Record every one. Watch it back once and note a single fix.

Days six and seven. Add a station with role-play. Ask someone to play a person and talk to them rather than about them. It is the family that most rewards a single rehearsal, because the first attempt at speaking to an actor is almost always spent describing what you would do instead of doing it.

The one rule for the whole week: out loud, always. Rehearsing in your head trains comprehension. The MMI assesses production.

Week two: circuits and feedback

Stop generating new answers and start running the day.

Days eight to ten. Full circuits of six to ten stations back to back, with the timings your school uses if it publishes them and a short reading period if it does not. Do not stop between stations to discuss. The whole point is to rehearse the reset, which is the specific skill the format demands and the one nobody practises: walking out of a station that went badly and arriving at the next one as a new person.

Days eleven and twelve. One or two sessions where someone who knows the format marks you. What you want from them is not a score. It is a report of what they actually heard: where you lost them, where you took a position, where you filled silence, what your last sentence was.

Days thirteen and fourteen. Logistics and sleep. Confirm the platform or the building. Read your own application once so nothing in it surprises you. Then stop.

What should I not do with two weeks?

Three things, all tempting.

Do not memorise answers to a list of predicted questions. The list will be wrong in detail and right in family, and memorised material breaks on contact with a rephrasing. Rehearse the four families and your own stock of examples.

Do not prepare only ethics stations. The about-you stations are answered worse, on average, precisely because everyone assumes they are free.

Do not buy a list of supposedly real questions. UBC’s own admissions page tells applicants to be very wary of costly preparatory services claiming to have real interview questions, and that is an admissions office talking, not a competitor.

A station, and two answers

An original station, not a real item from any school.

Prompt. “A hospital has one intensive care bed and two patients who need it. Both are stable enough to survive the next hour. How should the hospital decide?”

A weak answer. “This is a very difficult ethical dilemma. I think the hospital should consider factors like the severity of each patient’s condition, their likelihood of benefiting from treatment, and their overall prognosis. It is important that the decision is made fairly and without discrimination, and that both patients and families are treated with compassion. Ideally the hospital would try to find another bed or transfer one patient elsewhere.”

A strong answer. “The first thing I would want established is who decides, because the answer ‘the hospital should consider factors’ hides the real problem: somebody has to be accountable and it should not be the person who happens to be standing there at 3am. So the decision should sit with a named role, usually the intensive care consultant on call, working from a policy written before either of these patients existed. On the substance, the criterion I would defend is expected benefit from this specific bed: which patient’s outcome changes more because of intensive care rather than despite it. I would defend that over first-come-first-served, because arrival order tracks who lives closer to the hospital, and over broader social criteria, because that is where discrimination enters wearing the language of fairness. The hardest part is what the answer does to the person who does not get the bed. That patient is still owed a real plan, escalation if they deteriorate, and somebody telling their family the truth rather than a comfortable version of it. And the transfer option is worth pursuing, but it is not an answer, because someone still has to decide who is stable enough to move, which is the same decision again.”

What separates them. The weak answer names three reasonable criteria and never applies any of them, calls for compassion, and escapes into a transfer, which is the answer’s way of refusing the question. The strong answer separates who decides from what is decided, which is the move that distinguishes people who have thought about this from people who have read about it. It commits to one criterion, defends it against two named alternatives, explains why one of those alternatives is dangerous rather than just worse, deals with the patient who loses, and then closes the escape hatch it was offered. It also does not claim the problem is easy. An assessor can push on every clause of it.

Key numbers

• Two weeks: one week of solo timed speaking, one week of circuits with feedback.
• About 30 answers spoken out loud, not hundreds read.
• Four station families: situational, policy or opinion, about you, and acting.
• UBC publishes 10 stations in person; Manitoba publishes a virtual MMI for 2026-2027, in February.
• The last two days are for logistics and sleep, not new questions.

If you want the circuits run properly with marking, that is what interview coaching is for, and a single session is the smallest version of it.

Related: MMI practice questions with answers and how to handle an interview question you cannot answer.

Last reviewed 17 September 2026. Written by Arvin Ardakani, final-year medical student, 4th quartile on CASPer four times.