Professionalism matters to medical schools. They seek applicants who have developed an understanding of professionalism and who are ready to advance their competencies. The AAMC PREview® professional readiness exam is designed to assess professionalism skills. These skills, together with academic preparation, are required for success in medical school and beyond.
What is the PREview exam and what does it measure?
As a student pursuing a medical or health professions career, how do you envision the quality of care you will one day provide? In addition to technical skills and advanced scientific knowledge, we imagine it includes a commitment to lifelong learning, a willingness to collaborate with colleagues, and compassion. These are among the standards of personal accountability and relational skills that are assessed by the PREview exam and that schools are seeking in their applicants.
Personal Accountability
This skill area encompasses reliability, resilience, adaptability, ethical responsibility, and continuous self-improvement. These are all qualities that help medical students manage challenges, remain accountable, and grow through reflection and feedback.
Relational Skills
This skill area includes the ability to work effectively on teams, build relationships, and engage with patients and colleagues. Communication, collaboration, empathy and compassion are all relational skills.
How is the PREview exam developed?
The AAMC collaborates with subject matter experts with varied roles in academic medicine in the development of the PREview exam. This includes a group of admissions officers, faculty, student affairs representatives, and others. These experts work closely with students and understand the expectations and responsibilities of future health care professionals. Students also contribute to the development of the exam by sharing their own experiences handling challenging situations. Their feedback informs the development of the scenarios that appear on the exam.
What is the format of the PREview exam?
The PREview exam is a standardized situational judgment test that presents hypothetical scenarios and asks examinees to evaluate the effectiveness of a series of behavior responses to each scenario. Examinees’ responses provide insight into their knowledge of effective and ineffective behaviors for students entering post-graduate health care education.
The exam is delivered through a secure online testing environment and takes approximately 75 minutes to complete. It includes a single test section of 186 responses for examinees to rate. The scenarios are text-based and they are similar to what you may encounter in medical school or health professions training, though they do not require any previous experience in a health care setting.
What is the best way to prepare?
There is a section of our website dedicated to helping you prepare for the PREview exam with free resources. These resources help examinees understand the format of the exam and the competencies measured by it, and you are encouraged to take the two practice tests. We also encourage you to check your computer system and workstation requirements before test day. Access everything you need for success from our preparation page.
Interested in learning more about the history of the exam?
The PREview exam evolved from rigorous research identifying core personal competencies essential for medical student success, as documented in peer-reviewed publications dating back to 2013 (Koenig et al., 2013; Berardi-Demo et al., 2024). The first exams were administered in 2020, when the exam was then known as the AAMC Situational Judgment test. The name was changed in 2022 to the AAMC PREview professional readiness exam to better reflect its purpose as an admission tool for medical and other postgraduate health care programs.