What people ask before they start.

An objective structured clinical examination the Medical Council of Canada uses to assess whether an international medical graduate is ready to enter a Canadian residency program. Rather than answering questions about a case, you work through one: a series of short clinical encounters, each with a standardized patient and a physician examiner present.

A brief written statement introduces the clinical problem and sets out your tasks, which may be to take a history, to conduct and describe a physical examination, to explain a diagnosis, or some combination. You have eleven minutes, and two minutes between stations. The examination is twelve stations long, two of which are pilot stations that do not count toward your score.

Seven competencies: history taking, physical examination, communication skills, diagnosis, management, investigations, and data interpretation. They roll up into three domains for the purpose of subscores. Not every station assesses all seven, and how you speak with the patient is marked alongside what you ask them.

Because almost everything the examination marks only exists out loud. Which question you asked, the order you asked it in, whether you explained a diagnosis in words a frightened person could follow, whether you got to the red flags before the clock ran out. Reading a case rehearses none of that, and the thing that would — someone free at your hour, at your level, willing to be the patient again tonight — is the scarcest resource in exam preparation.

You choose a station and begin, and the clock runs eleven minutes. A simulated patient answers the way a standardized patient does: in character, only what you asked for, and no more. A simulated examiner is present for the whole station and hands over physical findings when you say what you would examine. You can type or speak your turns, and the replies are read back aloud, so the station can be worked the way the real one is.

A report organized by the competencies the examination assesses, saying which criteria you reached and which you left out, and quoting the moment in your own transcript where each one happened. Criteria that are safety-critical are marked apart from the rest, so a missed red flag reads as that night's reading rather than as a deduction.

No. We give feedback on what happened in your session, organized by competency. We do not report a score on the MCC's scale and we do not predict a result. The MCC's own guidance is that even its subscores should not be used to compare candidates.

Yes. 112 of the 154 adapted stations are open, and every new account starts with 3 free stations. Our adaptation of each case for Canadian practice is cross-checked by three independent model passes, and anything a majority cannot confirm, or that any pass flags as unsafe, is withheld rather than published. No physician has reviewed it, so practise the encounter here and keep a clinical reference for the medicine.

No. NACMATE is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with the Medical Council of Canada. Nothing on this site comes from or is approved by the MCC.