The AAMC’s PREview® Professional Readiness Exam is a situational judgment test designed to assess key professional skills that are critical for success in medical school and beyond. This exam evolved from rigorous research identifying core personal competencies essential for medical student success, as documented in peer-reviewed publications dating back to 2013 (read more here and here).
The PREview exam strengthens holistic admissions by providing a reliable and valid assessment of non-academic skills essential for success in medical school, residency training, and physician practice. As a key pillar of readiness assessment, it ensures applicants are professionally prepared, complementing the the MCAT exam's focus on academic readiness.
The AAMC regularly partners with medical educators, prehealth advisors, and medical students to comprehensively define professional readiness for medical school. This definition informs the premedical competencies that the PREview exam measures based on examinee responses to real-world scenarios faced by medical students.
The PREview exam is open to MD- and DO-granting medical schools and other postgraduate degree programs in the health professions. Explore this page and others on our site to learn more, and email the PREview team at preview@aamc.org with questions.
The PREview Exam Measures Professional Readiness
The PREview exam is a situational judgement test that measures two broad skill areas—relational skills and personal accountability—that have been identified by experts across the medical education community as key to the professional readiness that is critical to success in medical school and a career in medicine.
Relational Skills
This skill area includes the ability to work effectively on teams, build relationships, and engage compassionately with patients and colleagues. Communication, collaboration, empathy, and compassion are all part of relational skills.
Personal Accountability
This skill area encompasses ethical responsibility, reliability, resilience, adaptability, and continuous self-improvement—qualities that help medical students manage challenges, remain accountable, and grow through reflection and feedback.
For background on the premedical professional competency framework that underlies the PREview exam's assessment of professional readiness, refer to the Premed Competences Resources page.
PREview Exam Development
The PREview exam is community-driven, expert-developed, and evidence-based. All PREview exam design, development, and administration decisions are made to ensure medical schools and their applicants receive a valid and meaningful measurement of professional readiness.
You can trust that the AAMC's development of the PREview exam is:
- Community-driven, including contributions from medical school faculty, admissions officers, student affairs professionals, prehealth advisors, and medical students.
- Subject to rigorous review, including evaluation for potential bias, sensitivity concerns, and unintended disadvantages for any group of examinees by 10+ trained reviewers per item.
- Based in research on standardized testing and situational judgement tests (SJTs), as well as AAMC validity research over the past decade.
- Scored by reliable methods that have been validated by experts in SJTs and psychometric testing, ensuring a valid and reliable measurement of professional readiness.
- Built on a transparent process that has been documented in peer-reviewed scholarly publications from the earliest stages, with a publicly available scoring framework and ongoing validity research.
- Grounded in fair and equitable assessment standards supporting secure and uniform administration.
PREview Exam Design
The PREview exam presents examinees with a series of scenarios sets, each of which includes:
- a brief scenario based on a real-world situation students may experience in medical school, and
- four to eight items (also referred to as “responses”) that reflect a range of possible actions someone might take in response to the scenario.
Each scenario set presents a hypothetical dilemma that calls upon examinees’ understanding of one or more pre-medical professional competencies. Examinees are instructed to read each scenario and then rate the effectiveness of each response using a four-point scale ranging of “Very Ineffective,” “Ineffective,” “Effective,” and “Very Effective.” Each rating scale point includes its own definition to provide examinees with a common framework for how ratings are defined. There are 186 total items included on the PREview exam.
PREview Exam Scoring
The PREview score is based on the extent to which the examinee’s effectiveness ratings of each response (item) align with the consensus ratings developed in collaboration between the AAMC and medical education subject matter experts. Higher scores suggest that the examinee’s ratings align more closely with medical educators' consensus ratings, whereas lower scores suggest the examinee’s ratings align less closely with medical educators' consensus ratings.
An examinee's PREview score report includes the exam date, the total score on a scale from 1 to 9, a confidence band of plus or minus 1 point, and the percentile rank of score. PREview exam percentile ranks are publicly posted and are updated each May.
Implementing the PREview Exam Into Your Admissions Processes
Medical schools have complete flexibility in how they incorporate PREview scores into their admissions process, allowing each admissions team to tailor their approach to institutional priorities and evaluation frameworks.
Although PREview scores can add value throughout the medical school admissions process, the AAMC has found that scores are most frequently being used by admissions teams in the following ways.
- Early identification of strong candidates early in the screening process
- Adding depth to existing applicant data such as undergraduate GPA, MCAT score, and other application information
- As a "plus factor" when evaluating comparable applicants vs a binary qualifier or disqualifier
- Distinguishing metric during final selection as part of a weighted evaluation matrix or as a confirmation of impressions during interviews
For insight into how other schools using the PREview exam have implemented scores, watch Using the AAMC PREview Exam in Medical School Admissions, originally presented at Learn Serve Lead 2024: The AAMC Annual Meeting.
The AAMC PREview Team Is Here For You
Each medical school determines how the PREview exam will be incorporated into their holistic admissions process based upon institutional priorities and other important deciding factors. The AAMC PREview team is here to support your decision process. Go to the Adopt the PREview Exam page for next steps in the adoption process or email the PREview team at preview@aamc.org with questions or for a private presentation about the PREview exam.