Exeter Medical School: Overview

Exeter Medical School is the medical school of the University of Exeter. It is one of the top-ranked medical schools in the United Kingdom. The medical school has been ranked among the best in the UK for several years, and it was recently ranked 6th in the country by The Guardian.

Since Exeter is a fairly small medical school, medical students usually learn in small groups of 8-9 people, meaning they can benefit from a quiet environment, personalised teaching and form strong bonds with their peers. Moreover, Exeter is known for providing students with early clinical contact, which starts in the first month of year one. Together with Exeter’s long experience in teaching, all of these factors contribute to the medical school’s world-class level and international recognition.

The school is located on two scenic campuses: Truro Campus and St Luke's Campus. Both are located in Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom, which are just about 2 hours by train from London.

💡 How To Prepare for Medicine Interviews at Exeter?

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Exeter Medicine Selection Process (2023):
🔢 How does Exeter select students for medicine interviews? (new from 2022 entry)

GCSEs: Exeter does not place a large emphasis on the GCSE grades. The admissions team will only check if your grades meet Exeter’s minimum entry requirements. This is a necessary requirement to progress to a further part of the selection process.

A-levels: Provided your GCSE grades meet Exeter’s minimum entry requirements, your predicted grades will be weighted against your UCAT score. Exeter is quite unique in that it gives as much as 75% weight to your predicted grades (as of 2022), so your predicted grades form a fairly significant part of the selection process. You can use the table below to see how your predicted grades are scored against the UCAT.

Personal Statement: Personal statements and references are only taken into account when considering a case of mitigating circumstances. Otherwise, they aren’t used in Exeter’s selection process.

UCAT: Firstly, Exeter will convert your UCAT score into a decile score. Then, Exeter weights your UCAT score against your predicted A-level grades, assigning the UCAT 25% weight. A combined score can range from 0 to 100. You can use the above table to calculate your score (table taken from Exeter’s official Admission’s Process Statement for 2022 entry):

Please note that the above table shows scores for non-contextual applicants. If you qualify for widening participation, read more about Exeter’s admissions process here.

📊 What is the lowest required UCAT score to get an interview at Exeter?

🇬🇧 Home Students: For 2022 entry, the lowest UCAT score to receive an interview invitation from Exeter was 1840, while the average score of students invited to an interview was around 2570.

🌍 International Students: Since Exeter changes the selection process this year, there is no comparable data from previous years that could indicate this year’s UCAT cut-off. However, if you are curious, in the past years when Exeter used a Tier system to rank international students, all international students from Tier 1 were invited to an interview, and the cut-off for Tier 2 was 3040. Nonetheless, these numbers cannot be used to make any meaningful inferences.

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📤 When does Exeter send out interview invitations?

If you’ve applied for medicine at Exeter, you can expect to get a response from them between November and March of the application cycle.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 How many candidates get interviewed for Medicine at Exeter Medical School?

🇬🇧 Home Students: For 2022 entry, 1777 students have applied to study medicine at Exeter and 654 (38%) have been invited to attend a medicine interview.

🌍 International Students: For 2022 entry, 301 students have applied to study medicine at Exeter and 30 (10%) have been invited to attend a medicine interview.

Medicine Interviews at Exeter Medical School 2022:
🗓️ Medicine Interview dates (2023 entry):

Most likely, this year’s Exeter medicine interviews will take place between December 2022 and March 2023.

💬 What’s the interview format at Exeter Medical School?

For 2021 and 2022 entries, Exeter conducted their MMIs online via Zoom and using breakout rooms (automatically moving you between stations). There were usually 6-8 stations, each lasting about 3 minutes. This can indicate that each station could have involved only a single question and that follow-ups were rarely asked. As in a typical medicine MMI interview, each station was conducted by a different interviewer to ensure a fair assessment.

🧠 Exeter Medicine Interview Questions:

Motivations for medicine:

• Why would you like to study medicine at Exeter?
• What challenges do you expect to face during medical school?
• Why did you choose to study medicine and not nursing?
• What distinguishes doctors from vets apart from patients?
• What do you dislike about being a doctor?

Contribution to Exeter Medical School:

• Why did you choose Exeter?
• Why should we choose you and not one of the candidates waiting outside the door?
• How can you contribute to our medical school?
• What societies would you like to join or establish at Exeter?

Personality/Personal experiences:

• How would your friends describe you?
• What is your greatest strength and your greatest weakness?
• Why is it important for doctors to have interests outside of medicine?
• Imagine you have just had a really long day at medical school and come extremely tired to your flat. There you see one of your flatmates having a mental breakdown and crying. You know from experience that being a shoulder to cry on for them takes a lot of time and energy. Whose mental health would you prioritise in that situation - your own or your flatmates?
• Tell us about a situation that you could have handled better.
• Tell us about a situation that made you aware of the challenges related to being a doctor.

Medical Ethics:

• What do you understand by the term confidentiality? Can you provide an example when the rule of confidentiality shouldn’t be followed?
• What is the Hippocratic oath? What place does it have in modern medicine?
• Recently there have been massive protests against the delegalisation of abortion. What are the ethical arguments for and against abortion?
• A 17-year old patient comes to your GP practice and discloses they regularly engage in the use of illicit drugs. They ask you not to tell anyone, including the police. What factors should you consider in such a scenario, and who would you inform about the situation?

The NHS & Hot Topics:

• How would you explain the funding of the NHS to a fellow Year 11 student?
• Should the NHS endorse and give access to alternative medicines?
• Have you ever heard the term "winter pressures"? What is the cause of larger pressures in winter?
• How would you support a colleague at work that feels discriminated against due to their ethnic background?
• How do antibiotics work and how can bacteria develop resistance to them? Since developing antibiotic resistance is a natural process, how do our actions impact the process of developing antibiotic resistance?

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Please note that these aren’t questions that have been asked at Exeter Medical School in past years. Publishing such information would be against Exeter’s policy. The above questions are adjusted for the interview style at Exeter and are meant to give you a broad sense of the questions you may face.

👀 Exeter Medicine Interview Day

So, what exactly will your interview day look like? If you happen to be invited to an online MMI, then the procedure is pretty standard - you log in on a specified time, you may be briefed before the interview with other candidates, and then you start one of the stations after you finish the station you have moved automatically to a separate breakout room and so on.

However, if you happen to be invited to an in-person interview, then things will look slightly different. Exeter medicine interviews usually take place on-campus in one of the academic buildings. Before your MMI circuit will start you’ll be briefed together with other candidates by a member of Exeter’s admissions team. Then you’ll move to a location where the actual interview will take place. A ringing bell will signal the start and end times of both the reading time (that you get before you enter the station) and the station itself.

Luckily for you, the admissions team at Exeter was so kind as to prepare a short clip demonstrating what the medicine interview process looks like. Watch this before your interviews to know what to expect on your interview day:

🏆 How likely is it I’ll be given an offer after an interview at Exeter Medical School?

🇬🇧 Home Students: For 2022 entry, after 654 interviews, Exeter gave out 442 offers (68%) to students applying from the UK.

🌍 International Students: For 2022 entry, after 30 interviews, Exeter gave out 8 offers (27%) to international students.

🤵‍♀️ What are the interviewers like at Exeter Medical School?

In the past years, students who’ve sat through medicine interviews at Exeter unanimously agree that interviewers at Exeter are very friendly and supportive, which makes the interview experience much less stressful. During the Exeter MMI, you’ll face 7-8 different interviewers, so expect that each will be slightly different in their approach, warmth or reactions.

⏳ How long does it take to hear back after Exeter medicine interview?

It may feel tempting to check your email several times a day immediately after your medicine interview. We’ve all been there. However, you need to be patient, as Exeter usually replies once most interviews have been completed.

✅ Exeter Medical School Interviews: 3 Tips

Do your research about Exeter

Questions about your motivations to study medicine at Exeter often come up in the medicine MMI. Ensure you know the highlights of the medical school, including the course structure, teaching hospitals, any additional modules, where teaching takes place etc.

There is no need to know the tiniest details about each university, but do make some general notes - it helps to show you are excited about joining Exeter.

Be yourself and relax

You can think that it’s the most generic piece of advice ever. But at the same time, it’s also the most important one.

After all, the main aim of the interview is to learn more about who you really are - your personality, your traits and your weaknesses. If you relax and treat the Exeter MMI as a friendly conversation, your personality will shine through and you’ll come across as authentic.

No excuses that your personality isn’t well-suited, impressive or that you are not enough! Remember that not everyone is invited to an interview and that you have been invited for a reason.

Prepare for common questions

Luckily for you, the MMI format at Exeter is pretty standard and the questions are relatively predictable. Make sure to prepare for the most common questions, such as “Why should we choose you”, “Why medicine?” or “Why Exeter”.

Although they may seem like simple questions at a glance, coming up with a unique, persuasive answer is not that obvious. How to stand out, then? You can find free guides on how to answer the most common interview questions in our innovative interview prep resource.

🤞 Good luck with your Exeter Medicine Interviews!