Step one: the invite and check-in
Your invitation email has a Check In button, and that's where everything starts. Kira suggests setting aside fifteen to thirty minutes for check-in the first time, and it's worth doing the day you get the email rather than the day you plan to record. Check-in walks you through the instructions, a short registration form, any supplemental uploads your school asked for, and a camera and microphone setup. If you click Learn More and go to the Assessment Details slide, you'll see how many questions there are, what type they are, and how long the whole thing should take. That slide is the single most useful thing to look at before you practice, because it tells you the real timings you're training for.
Step two: the practice questions
Depending on how your school set things up, your check-in page may include a practice step, and sometimes it's required before the real assessment unlocks. Practice works differently from the real thing in two important ways: in practice you can redo questions and replay your recordings, and in the real assessment you get one attempt per question and can't watch it back. The practice questions themselves are usually light ice-breakers about hobbies or travel. Don't skip them just because they're easy. They're the only chance you get to see yourself exactly as a reviewer will, so use them to fix your lighting, framing, and audio before it counts.
Step three: the real assessment
- •Video questions play once, and the question text stays on screen while you prepare and while you answer.
- •You get a short prep window, then a fixed response time, and the recording submits automatically when the time is up. You can also submit early.
- •Written questions have no prep time. The clock starts as soon as the question appears, but you usually get a longer response window than for video.
- •Each school sets its own prep and response times and its own number of questions, which is why the Assessment Details slide matters so much.
- •There's one attempt per question. If you stumble, keep going, because a calm recovery is far better than a frozen silence.
Who actually watches your answers
Kira provides the platform, but the people evaluating you are reviewers chosen by the school. Kira's own guidance tells reviewers to read the competency being assessed, read the question, then watch or read your response and score it against a rubric the school designed. Several reviewers can score the same applicant, and the school decides how much each competency counts. In other words, you're not being judged by an algorithm on how polished you look. You're being rated by people who are asking whether your answer showed the specific quality that question was built to measure.
How Kira compares to CASPer and the MMI
- •CASPer is a standardized test run by a different company, with the same broad format for every school that uses it, and your result is reported as a quartile. Kira is set up by each school individually, with its own questions, timings, and rubric.
- •The MMI is live. A real interviewer sits across from you, on screen or in person, and can react and ask follow-ups. Kira gives you no reactions at all, which is exactly why it feels so strange the first time.
- •Kira often comes earlier in the process than interviews, so at a school like TMU it works as a gate. A weak Kira can mean the rest of your file never gets a close look.
- •The skills overlap a lot. Structured reasoning helps on CASPer, honest storytelling helps in the MMI, and Kira asks for both in a format where you only get one take.
Knowing how Kira works takes most of the fear out of it, but it doesn't tell you how you personally come across on camera, and that's the part most applicants can't judge for themselves. If you'd like an honest outside read before your window opens, I run Kira prep where we do timed questions and watch the recordings back together. Or start with the free fifteen minute call, and I'll tell you straight whether you need any help at all.