What the Auckland MMI actually scores you on

Auckland publishes exactly what its MMI assesses. It publishes it in two PDFs that are linked from the MMI page and from nowhere else, and it does not repeat either list on the interviewee FAQ page that most applicants actually read. So a lot of people sit this interview without ever having seen the mark scheme, which is a strange thing to be true of a published mark scheme.

There are two separate lists and they do different jobs. Domains are what the scenario is about: one per station, seven stations. Attributes are what you are scored on inside it: eight of them, three per scenario, and you are never told which three.

The rule that changes how you prepare

One sentence, three facts. Three attributes per station. You are not told which three. All eight get covered somewhere across the seven stations.

You cannot play to a mark scheme you cannot see, which sounds like bad news and mostly is not. What it actually rules out is the strategy of guessing the target and aiming everything at it. What it rules in is the far more boring strategy of not leaving whole attributes unspoken. An answer that reasons beautifully but never names a structural cause has skipped one. An answer that lists causes and never takes a position has skipped a different one.

How the marks actually add up

At its 19 August 2026 applicant webinar, UoA put a number on it for the first time. Each station scores its three attributes on a scale of one to ten, so a single station is worth up to 30, and across the seven scenarios you can expect to be assessed on all eight attributes.

A different person marks each of your seven answers, so seven separate reviewers assess you and none of them sees more than one response. The reviewers are a mix of UoA staff and external health professionals, answers are distributed at random, and UoA said repeatedly that AI is not used to mark the MMI or to select students. Reviewers can also flag concerns, including an applicant’s ability to communicate in English. Scores are emailed to applicants around October.

The seven domains

One station each, in a fixed order that is the same for every applicant. UoA says the same seven domains are assessed every year and that new scenarios are written annually, so the domains are stable and the questions are not.

1. Equity

A social or health issue that lands differently on different groups. You are expected to recognise the inequity, talk about what contributes to it and what it does to people, and, often, say what could be done about it.

2. Moral/ethical

A question about your view on an issue. UoA is explicit that this is not a knowledge test: what is being watched is whether you can spot the dilemma and hold more than one side of it at once.

3. Career choice

Your motivation, your goals and how you decide things. Expect it to reach into self awareness, and into how you plan to look after yourself over a long career.

4. Healthcare issue/topic

Something in the health news. You are not being marked on depth of knowledge, but you do need to know enough about the topic to form an opinion and say it out loud.

5. Personal insight

Your qualities, interests and ambitions. Have examples ready of things you are good at and things you are not, because the station is asking what defines you and how that helps or gets in the way.

6. Personal experience

Something you have actually lived through, described and then questioned. UoA asks you not to pick the worst thing that has ever happened to you or anything you would find upsetting to discuss.

7. Hauora Māori

An issue with relevance to Māori health. In UoA’s own words, this station is assessing "things like cultural safety, critical thinking and understanding of key structural determinants of Māori health".

The station names above are UoA’s exact wording. The explanations are ours. UoA’s own domain description PDF carries its full description of each one plus a worked example scenario per domain, and it is two pages long. Go and read it. We do not host it, mirror it or reprint it, and neither should anyone else: it carries a use restriction and it stays UoA’s.

The eight attributes

These are the qualities being marked, whatever the scenario is about. Note the exact wording, because it is more specific than the shorthand most preparation sites use: it is "Collaboration in teamwork and leading in teams", not "teamwork and leadership", and "Cultural safety and self reflection", with no hyphen.

1. Communication

Clear, expressive, fluent speech at a moderate pace, with your volume and intonation under control.

2. Equity

Awareness of social justice, fairness and human rights in a health context, and the ability to describe how systemic discrimination and the social determinants keep inequities in place.

3. Ethical and moral reasoning

Seeing more than one side, and applying ethical principles with some integrity to get to a fair answer.

4. Critical thinking and quality of argument

Naming the problem, weighing what you were given, drawing an unbiased inference from it, and building an argument somebody could follow.

5. Cultural safety and self reflection

Recognising that your own culture shapes how you see this, and being willing to learn from people whose does not.

6. Collaboration in teamwork and leading in teams

Working in a mixed team: initiating, building trust, handling conflict, and describing what effective leadership actually consists of.

7. Resilience and motivation

Getting through challenge and change, including after failing at something, with real intent behind the career and real actions behind your own wellbeing.

8. Mental flexibility and problem solving

Thinking fluently, combining ideas, and getting somewhere a rehearsed answer would not have gone.

Again, names are UoA’s and descriptions are ours. UoA’s attributes PDF has its own descriptor for each, in its own words, and it is one page.

How the two lists actually interact

The unhelpful reading is that domain and attribute are the same thing said twice, because Equity appears on both lists. They are not. The domain tells you what the scenario is about; the attribute tells you what is being marked in your answer to it.

So an Equity scenario is not necessarily marked on the Equity attribute, and a Personal experience scenario can perfectly well be marked on Critical thinking and quality of argument. Three of the eight, undisclosed, on every station. Which is the point of the design: it stops the interview being a memory test for eight rehearsed paragraphs.

The practical version of all of this is short. Say what the issue is. Say why it is an issue, including the causes that are structural rather than individual. Take a position and be willing to move it. Use a concrete example when you have one. Talk for the full three minutes and land the ending. That covers most of the eight most of the time, without ever guessing which three are live.

Here is how to actually fit that into three minutes, which is a separate problem and a harder one than it looks.

A note on the Hauora Māori station

It is one of the seven, it is marked like the rest, and it is the one where the prevailing commercial advice is worst: several well ranked preparation pages amount to suggesting you learn some vocabulary. UoA describes the station as assessing "things like cultural safety, critical thinking and understanding of key structural determinants of Māori health", which is not a vocabulary test and cannot be passed as one.

We are not going to write preparation advice for it here. Doing that properly requires an author with standing that this page does not have, and doing it badly would be worse than leaving the gap visible. Read UoA’s own description in the domain PDF, and take it seriously as a domain rather than as a box.