OMSAS ABS verifiers, explained.

Last updated: August 2026

A verifier is the person who can confirm that an activity on your Autobiographical Sketch happened the way you described it. OMSAS asks you to name one for every entry, with full contact details, because the schools may reach out to confirm what you wrote.

Anatomy of an entry

The ABS holds up to 32 entries. Every entry is the same skeleton, and most of it is structured fields rather than prose.

Category: One of six: Employment, Volunteer Activities, Extracurricular Activities, Awards and Accomplishments, Research, or Other.
Description: A short title line — the label for the activity, not the story. "Research Assistant — Cardiology Lab", not a summary of what you did.
Start Date / To Date: Month precision, written as YYYY-MM. An activity you're still doing uses "Present" as its end.
Location: City-level.
Level of Education: Before Undergraduate, Undergraduate, or Post-Undergraduate.
Hours, Frequency and Total Hours: Hours with a frequency of Per Week or Per Month, plus a total. Decimals are allowed. Awards and Accomplishments entries work differently: they use Date Received and Duration — "One-Time", for instance — instead of hours.
Category-specific details, 150 characters: This is where the writing actually lives, and it is short. Which fields you get depends on the category:
Employment — whether it was full or part-time, summer or academic year, plus Responsibilities.
Volunteer Activities — the same summer-or-academic-year context, plus Responsibilities.
Extracurricular Activities — summer or academic year, plus Type of Activity / Level of Performance.
Research — Project Title, Type of Publication (100 characters), and My Role.
Awards and Accomplishments — Qualifications and Competition Involved.
Other — Additional Information.
For Ottawa / For Queen's: Two school-specific flags. uOttawa applicants mark their top three activities in each category, up to 18 in total. Queen's applicants mark their top three in Employment, Volunteer Activities and Extracurricular Activities only, up to 9 — which is why the other categories show N/A for Queen's.

The verifier block

Every entry carries a verifier, and the verifier is not just a name and an email. Each one needs a title, first and last name, email address, a full mailing address — street, city, province, country, postal code — a telephone number, and optionally a comments field.

That is a real amount of information to collect, and most of it is information you don't have. You know Dr. Smith's email; you probably don't know their office postal code or direct line, and asking twenty people for their mailing address is its own small project.

What makes it hard

The administrative load sits entirely with you. OMSAS does not contact your verifiers on your behalf — you gather every detail, and you are the one chasing anyone who hasn't replied.

And the people you're chasing are doing you a favour — every follow-up spends a little of the goodwill you asked them for in the first place.

And then it locks. Once your application is submitted, no changes or corrections to the ABS are possible — not a typo in a verifier's phone number, not a wrong total-hours figure. That single fact is why drafting in August and contacting verifiers early matters more than it looks like it should. Everything has to be right the first time.

Is this allowed?

ClearedMD doesn't write, edit, or submit anything for you. You write your own activities and your own verifiers confirm them in their own words — the same people confirming the same facts, just without the email chasing. We're an independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by OMSAS or any medical school.

Where ClearedMD fits

Everything above is true whether or not you use anything to manage it. If you'd rather not run it out of a spreadsheet: ClearedMD sends one link per verifier, for one activity. They open it and choose one of three things — confirm it, suggest a change, or say they can't verify it — from their phone, with no account, in about a minute.

You see every request's status in one place: sent, viewed, confirmed, changes suggested, or declined. The content fields match the ABS — categories, dates, hours, descriptions, and the 150-character detail fields — so what a verifier confirms is the text you'll submit. And if a school follows up in January about an activity Coach Bennett confirmed for your varsity volleyball entry back in August, they can reopen exactly what they confirmed.

Build your ABS free