The sub is split and both sides are right. Interviewing is a skill and it is now 50–60% of the score in surgery, orthopaedics and Queensland BPT 123, so practice pays. It also produces rehearsed candidates panels can no longer read, and trainees who are interview and CV behemoths rather than good doctors.
Why coaching exists. Selection has moved onto the interview. General Surgery weights it at 50% 1; Orthopaedics scores the CV only as a gate and ranks on interview 60% plus verbal referee report 40% 2; Queensland adult BPT is a six-station MMI worth 60%, with the CV formally not counted 3. When the CV stops separating people, the interview does — so people buy coaching, and the arms race follows the money.
The case for. Interviewing is a discrete skill, and it is the one skill you cannot pick up from doing your job well 4. Nobody argues that studying for an exam is cheating; a coached candidate is not necessarily a dishonest one, just one who can say a true thing in a structured, timed way instead of dissolving 4. Anaesthetics applicants routinely describe preparing for three to six months, as for an exam 5.
The case against. The objection is not really about efficacy. Interviews are sold as a read on who you are, so rehearsal feels like being taught to lie 4. Interviewers say the same thing from the other side of the table: an obviously over-prepared candidate cannot be evaluated as a person at all, which is the entire point of sitting in the room 4. And coaching is bought, not earned, so it maps onto who can pay.
The structural critique, which is the most upvoted line in the thread. If the interview is most of the score, the system selects for interview performance. The sub's own summary of anaesthetics is that we are now producing trainees who are interview and CV behemoths and clinically ordinary — and that you cannot blame the candidates for optimising against the published weightings 4.
Honest answer. Practice is worth it and costs nothing; paid coaching is worth it if you are genuinely poor at the format, and mostly wasted if you already present well. It buys you fluency, not a pass mark.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
interviews are "supposed" to be your authentic self, personality, and motivations - so coaching feels like being taught to lie.
To me, interviewing well is a skill just like any other - it SHOULD be studied and practiced. It isn't about rehearsing answers or lying, but about being able to relay your thoughts in a structured and succinct fashion.
But now we're ending up with a bunch of anaesthetics trainees that are interview/CV behemoths, but clinically are generally pretty shit
A big problem with over-rehearsed obviously coached candidates is that you just cannot evaluate them as a person, their character, very easily
my best advice for the anaesthetic interviews is that you need to be preparing for it like an exam. 3-6 months of regular study and practice.
Asked 7 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(coach|coaching|tutor|course|paid).{0,30}interview|interview.{0,30}(coach|coaching|course|tutor)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments on both sides of the coaching thread, deliberately paired so the 'it is a skill, practise it' position sits beside 'it feels like being taught to lie' and the interviewer's own objection, plus the structural critique about interview and CV behemoths.