How do you find a good CASPer tutor?

Picking a CASPer tutor comes down to four checks you can make before paying anything. One: has this person actually sat the test, how many times, and in which year. Two: will the same person coach you at every session, or are you being assigned to whoever is free. Three: will they show you a scored example answer, including a weak one, before you buy. Four: can you explain the price to yourself. Arvin Ardakani, who coaches CASPer at ExperienceMED, puts his own packages through the same four checks. A coach who puts a commitment in writing and stands behind it is a good sign. The real warning signs are nobody marking your answers personally and no direct line to the coach.

Why does it matter whether the tutor has sat CASPer?

Because the test is not a knowledge test and the difficulty is not in the rubric. What breaks people is what the clock does to their judgment around the eighth or ninth scenario: answers get shorter, reasoning gets thinner, and the same person who wrote a careful answer at scenario two writes a slogan at scenario nine.

Someone who has sat it knows that from the inside and can tell you what they did about it. Someone who has only read about the test will teach you a structure, which is the easy half. Arvin Ardakani, who scored in the 4th quartile on CASPer four times, builds his coaching around that back half of the test.

Ask it directly and listen for a specific answer: how many sittings, which quartile, and what went wrong in the weakest one. A tutor who can tell you that is a person who has been there. “Our coaches are all successful applicants” is a sentence about a company.

Does the same person coach you every time?

This is the question most applicants never ask, and it changes the product more than anything on the sales page.

If the coach rotates, nobody holds your arc. The person marking your week-four answer does not know that you made the same mistake in week one, so the feedback restarts each time and you get four opinions instead of one trajectory. Some large providers manage this well with shared notes. Many do not.

Ask: who specifically will I be working with, will it be the same person each session, and what happens if they are unavailable.

Will they show you scored examples before you pay?

They should, and it should include a weak answer with the reasoning for why it is weak. Here is why that specific request separates the serious from the rest: anyone can publish a strong model answer. Explaining precisely why a tidy, well-organised, four-step answer would score in the middle requires actually understanding what raters reward.

Look for diagnosis, not a script. Arvin Ardakani’s experience is that no single fix suits every student: one gives too many examples, another speaks well but leaves no lasting impression, another knows to show their thinking but cannot yet put it into words. A good tutor finds the specific thing holding you back and coaches that.

Remember what the marking looks like. Casper is scored by multiple independent human raters, with a different rater for each scenario, and your final score is an average of their impressions. There is no single examiner to profile and nobody outside Acuity Insights sees your rated answers. So treat any claim to know exactly why you scored what you scored as an inference. A good tutor will say so.

What does a fair price look like?

Arvin Ardakani will not invent market figures. What he can do is publish his own and let you compare: every price is on the packages page, and sessions are on the booking page.

• A strategy call, a single session, or a written review of your answers.
• The Starter Success Package: the course, the scenario bank, the test-day sheet, an AI model Arvin trained on how he teaches and corrects answers, for written feedback at any hour, and check-ins from Arvin.
• The Pro Prep Package: Starter plus two 60-minute private sessions with him, marked live, recorded for you.
• The Elite 4th Quartile Package: Starter plus a private 60-minute session with him every week until your test day, with a fresh marked mock each week.

Two tests for any price, his included. First, how much time with a human reading your actual answers does the price buy. Second, what would you have paid if the free official practice test had been the only thing you needed. Take that free practice test first.

What should make you walk away?

• Nobody marks your answers personally. If your answers go to an automated score or a rotating pool of markers, nobody learns how you think. At ExperienceMED, Arvin Ardakani marks every answer himself.
• No direct access to the coach. Questions come up between sessions. A good coach answers them; Arvin’s students text him directly on WhatsApp.
• No commitment behind the program. A coach who believes in the method puts it in writing. ExperienceMED’s 4th Quartile Promise does: finish the program, and if you do not reach the 4th quartile, Arvin keeps working with you next cycle at no extra cost, until you do.
• Claimed access to real test content. That would mean someone broke a confidentiality agreement. It also makes the practice useless, because the scenarios change.
• No named, dated proof. Testimonials without names or dates are decoration.
• Pressure on the calendar. “Two spots left” on a page that has said that for six months.
• No visible marked work. If you cannot see what the feedback looks like, you cannot judge it.

Acuity Insights states that it does not endorse any third-party course, and that applicants using third-party materials do worse than those using its free resources. Arvin Ardakani’s answer is to use both: ExperienceMED tells applicants to take the free official test first, because it shows the format. What it never shows is what is weak in your own answer, and a generic course or a generic AI score does not either. A coach who reads your answer, diagnoses the specific thing holding you back and coaches that one thing does.

A question to ask on a first call, and two answers

An original prompt, written for this page. Ask a prospective tutor this:

Here is an answer I wrote. Tell me what is wrong with it. “A colleague is taking credit for my work. I would first speak to him privately to understand his perspective, then I would document my contributions, and if it continued I would escalate to our supervisor. This balances directness with professionalism and gives him a chance to correct the situation.”

Weak response from a tutor. “That is a solid structure. You have got a clear three-step approach and you mention professionalism, which raters like. I would add a sentence about self-reflection at the end and maybe another about why teamwork matters in medicine. With a bit more depth on each step you would be in good shape.”

That is a tutor grading the shape of your answer. It adds words and changes nothing.

Strong response from a tutor. “It is organised and it is hollow, and those two things travel together. Three problems. First, you never say what you would actually say to him, and the whole answer turns on that sentence. ‘Understand his perspective’ is a placeholder. Second, you have not considered that you might be wrong, that he may believe it was joint work, or that the credit was misassigned by someone else entirely, and an answer that assumes its own facts reads as inflexible. Third, ‘escalate to our supervisor’ is doing a lot of work with no detail: escalate for what outcome, and what do you want the supervisor to do. Rewrite it with one line of dialogue you would genuinely say, one reason you might be mistaken, and a specific ask for the supervisor. It will be shorter and score better.”

Why that is the tutor to hire. They told you your structured answer was empty, they named three specific failures rather than one general one, they gave an instruction you can act on tonight, and they did not pad it with praise. That is what you are paying for. A first call is long enough to find out whether you will get it.

Key numbers

• 4 checks before you pay: sat the test, same coach, scored examples, explainable price.
• 1 free official practice test, repeatable, taken before you buy anything.
• 3 CASPer packages, every price published on the packages page so you can compare.
• 1 marked example of your own work is the minimum a tutor should show you before a purchase.
• 0 tutors, anywhere, can see your rated answers or your rater’s notes.

If you want to test the fit before committing, start with a short call: book a session. Or take the free CASPer assessment, which Arvin Ardakani marks personally at ExperienceMED, and judge the feedback for yourself.

Related: Is CASPer prep worth it? and CASPer prep courses compared.