Australian Doctor Interview Questions
Australian medical interviews are criterion based. State merit selection rules mean every candidate gets the same questions, each mapped to a selection criterion and scored against a rubric, and the criteria barely change between position descriptions. College selection adds its own formats: timed monologues for anaesthesia, multiple mini interviews for surgery and rural generalism, recorded video for some programmes.
This hub collects the questions by career stage, mapped to the criteria panels score against, with guidance on what the panel is listening for and the format your programme uses.
Updated 26 October 2026
Medical school admissions
Australian medical school interview questions
The nine station types Australian programmes use, undergraduate and graduate, with rural practice and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health alongside motivation, ethics and communication.
Staff specialist interviews
Staff specialist interview questions
Criterion mapped questions on clinical skills, teamwork and leadership, teaching and supervision, research and QI, clinical governance, on call and cultural safety.
Specialty training selection
Specialty training interview questions
ANZCA, RACP, RACS, ACEM, RANZCP, RANZCOG, ACRRM and the other colleges, with the format each uses and the scenarios their panels set.
RMO and registrar jobs
RMO interview questions
The twenty minute hospital interview for resident and unaccredited registrar posts, the same for local and overseas graduates: experience, conflict, errors, strengths and the deteriorating patient scenario.
Why candidates lose marks
The content is fine. The structure is poor.
We sit on interview panels, from medical school admissions to consultant appointments, and we see the same thing every round. The candidate knows the answer. The content is fine. The structure is poor, so the answer is poor: the example that never reaches its outcome, the clinical scenario that opens with the treatment and forgets the assessment, the governance answer with the incident at the end. The panel scores the shape, and the shape is what lets them down.
The mistake is the same at every level and so is the fix. Every question a panel asks has a structure the panel is marking against. Behavioural questions want the situation, your actions and the outcome with a line of reflection. Clinical scenarios want you to see the patient, assess, treat, decide, escalate clearly and say what comes afterwards. Dilemmas want patient safety first, then information, escalation and support. We give you the frameworks, and every question in the bank tells you which one applies.
Then you practise, out loud, against the clock, on the real questions in the real format, and the AI marks the structure as well as the content and tells you what to do again. Repetition is what makes the shape hold when you are nervous. Reading model answers does not; saying them under time pressure with someone probing does.
How to use these questions
- 1
Read the position description's selection criteria first, then the questions marked as asked in most interviews for your stage. Write one STAR example per criterion in your own words, then practise saying each aloud in about two minutes.
- 2
Check the format your programme uses. A four minute monologue, an MMI station and a structured panel reward different preparation, and the stage pages tell you which to expect.
- 3
The AI interviewer runs the same questions in the format your programme uses, tells you which panel member is asking, and marks each answer against the criterion it was written for.