McMaster Engineering Supplementary Application: Questions
McMaster Engineering’s supplementary application is three recorded video answers and one short written answer. The prep time is ten seconds. Not ten minutes, not one; ten seconds, then two minutes on camera. That single fact should shape your entire preparation.
The format
- Three video questions. For each, 10 seconds to read the question and 2 minutes to record your response.
- One written question. 7 minutes in total to read and respond (it was 10 in earlier cycles), no word limit.
- One application for all programs. Mandatory for Engineering, Computer Science, Integrated Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences (iBioMed), and Bachelor of Technology. You complete it once and it’s used for every Faculty of Engineering program you applied to.
- $50 CAD fee, paid through OUAC as a program fee.
- Not technical. McMaster states there are no skill-testing or technical questions. Questions are interview-style, about how you think, communicate, reflect and respond to situations.
The four competencies
McMaster publishes what it assesses: engagement, collaboration, innovation and creativity, and resilience. Reviewers are trained on a rubric that isn’t published, and individual results aren’t released. But four named competencies with three video questions means a good bet is that each question maps to one or two of them. Prepare one strong story for each of the four, and you can reach for the right one in ten seconds.
McMaster also says its questions come in two broad types. Personal questions ask about you: what you value, what you’d do in a situation, your experience working alone and with others. Scenario questions put you in a situation and ask you to reason through it. Public descriptions from the faculty emphasise that they want to see how you identify what matters, make reasonable assumptions, and explain your thinking in a logical order.
What ten seconds changes
With ten seconds, there is no prep window in any real sense. You read the question and you are recording. That means:
- Your first sentence has to be reflexive. For a story question: name the situation. For a scenario: name the first thing you’d want to know. Practice until that opening is automatic.
- Thinking happens out loud. That’s fine, and for scenario questions it’s what they want. “The first thing I’d want to know is… if it turned out that… then I’d…” is the sound of reasoning in order.
- Two minutes is long. Most students run out of content at seventy seconds and pad. Have a second beat ready: what you’d do differently, what it cost, what you’d watch for next time.
- A card with four words on it, one story per competency, just out of frame, turns ten seconds into a choice instead of a search.
Fifteen practice questions in the McMaster format
AcceptMe’s practice questions, built around scenarios with an ethical or judgement edge and the four McMaster competencies. Not McMaster’s questions. Run three in a row with ten seconds of prep and a two-minute clock; do not read them in advance.
- You’re finishing a design project due tomorrow and notice your partner has filled the results table with data from trials your team never ran. They say everyone does it. What do you do tonight?
- You’re a summer student. Your supervisor, who decides whether you’re rehired, tells you to skip a scheduled guard inspection on a machine because a big order has to ship by five. How do you respond?
- Two days after your team submits a bridge-design entry, you find an error in the load calculations that means it would fail the judged test. Fixing it means admitting the mistake to the organisers. What do you do?
- Some engineering schools ban AI coding assistants in first year; others require them from day one. Give the strongest argument on each side, then say what policy you would set.
- At a design showcase a teammate presents the control system you built almost alone and describes it as his work. The judges are impressed and you advance. What do you do?
- You captain a robotics team and your two most experienced builders have stopped speaking after a dispute about rebuilding the drivetrain three weeks before the championship. What do you do first?
- Beyond rankings, why McMaster Engineering specifically?
- An autonomous delivery robot injures a cyclist after misclassifying a construction zone. The company blames the city’s road markings; the city blames the company. Who is responsible, and how would you reason about it?
- You lead a student team building a low-cost water filter for a community partner. With one month left you can afford either a third round of contamination testing or the solar pump upgrade the community asked for. Which, and why?
- You tutor in a physics help room. A student slams her test down, says she studied harder than ever and still failed, and says she’s clearly too stupid for engineering. What do you say in the next two minutes?
- At your part-time job the owner asks you to set up a tablet that quietly records customers’ faces for a marketing database, with no sign in the store. What do you do?
- At a public meeting about a wind project your team designed, a retired farmer says the turbines will ruin the view his family has had for four generations. How do you respond to him?
- A school board proposes facial-recognition cameras for attendance and security. Parents are split; students weren’t consulted. Walk through the perspectives and say what you’d recommend.
- You join a student engineering team mid-season. The founders have worked together for two years and answer your suggestions with “that’s not how we do it.” How do you earn a voice?
- Two midterms Thursday, a prototype demo Friday morning, a request to cover a Wednesday shift, and a close friend having a hard week. What do you do, in what order?
A worked answer
The first thing I’d want to know is what the second round of testing showed. If two rounds came back clean and consistent, a third is insurance; if the second round had any variance, the third isn’t optional, because a filter that sometimes passes contaminants is worse than no filter, since people trust it. So my answer depends on that, and I’d say so to the team. If the testing is solid, I’d go with the pump, because the community asked for it and a filter nobody uses because hauling water by hand is too much work is also a failure. But I wouldn’t just decide. I’d go back to the partner and tell them the honest trade-off: we can give you the pump now or one more round of proof that the water is safe. In my experience people are willing to wait for safety if you explain it and they’re not if you just decide for them. What I’d watch for is my own bias toward the exciting upgrade over the boring test, because that’s the mistake engineers make when they’re proud of a design.
That answer doesn’t pick until it has named what the choice depends on, involves the people affected, and ends on a self-aware line. Those three moves are what “how you think” looks like on a rubric.
The written question
Seven minutes, no word limit, which in practice means 150 to 250 words. Same discipline as the video: decide your one point in the first minute, write straight through, fix the ending in the last minute. Practice on prompts like these with a seven-minute timer:
- An engineer learns a space heater the company has sold for three years can overheat when a cheap sensor drifts. No injuries yet; a recall would cost about a year’s profit. What should the engineer do, and what should the company do?
- Describe a time something you designed, built or organised failed outright, and you turned what you learned into a better second attempt.
- Your city can fund one project: replacing failing century-old water mains in the poorest part of town, or a smart-sensor traffic network officials say will cut emissions. Argue for one and address the strongest objection.
Mistakes specific to McMaster
- Preparing technical content. There isn’t any. Time spent revising physics is time not spent on stories.
- Practicing with a long prep window. If you rehearse with a minute to think, ten seconds will feel like a malfunction.
- Giving a verdict on scenarios without the reasoning. The verdict isn’t graded. The order of your thinking is.
- Forgetting that one application covers every program. If you applied to Computer Science and Engineering, this is the one shot for both.
Where to go from here
The McMaster Engineering interview questions guide collects the prompts applicants have reported and works through answers, including the initiative question that the initiative guide builds a story for. The guide to Kira Talent interviews covers the platform the three videos run on. The same application covers iBioMed, and that guide explains what the Health Sciences crowd should read differently. Ten seconds of prep is the whole difficulty; set an AcceptMe custom interview to ten seconds and two minutes, draw scenario questions you have not seen, and practice until the first sentence arrives before the clock does.
Keep reading
- Supplementary Applications in Ontario: Every Program Compared Every Ontario business and engineering program with a supplementary application: what each asks, the video and written timings, and all the deadlines.
- Waterloo Engineering AIF and Video: Sample Answers and Prep How Waterloo reads the AIF's 150-word answers, what the mandatory video interview asks, fifteen practice questions and a worked answer about a build.
- U of T Engineering Online Student Profile: Video Questions The U of T Engineering Personal Profile for Fall 2027: three timed videos, what the faculty reads for, fifteen practice questions and a worked answer.
- McMaster Engineering Interview Questions and How to Answer The written and video questions Mac Engineering applicants report each January, with worked answers built on the STAR method.