ORAL EXAM GUIDELINES

The oral exam will be 25 minutes long in person. There will be three examiners, all of whom are either professors or demonstrators in the course, and at least one will be a professor. We will ask you specific questions about two of the three experiments you have done. You choose the first experiment to discuss; we choose the second. You will not be told beforehand which experiment we will choose, so you must be prepared to talk about all three of them. Let the examiners know if there were unusual problems with one of the experiments that were out of your control, e.g. you had to switch experiments suddenly because the apparatus broke.

Your exam will normally be rescheduled if you are more than 9 minutes late.

If at any point during the exam you feel you need a short pause, don't hesitate to ask. The examiners all understand that these exams can be stressful. You may want to have some water/tea/coffee/… handy in case your mouth gets dry.

Don't be afraid to answer “I don't know” to some questions, and don't worry if you struggle with some questions. Oral exams are very dynamic with examiners adjusting their questions to explore what you know; even the very best student is likely to be asked one or more questions that they can't answer.

Bring Your Notebooks

Don’t forget to bring your notebooks to the exam; you may refer to them, and it is likely that we may want to see them, e.g. for diagrams, data, or results. Your experiment notebooks will be your one and only resource; you will not be allowed to refer to the lab manuals or other references during the exam. In preparation for the exam, you may wish to go through your notebooks and add certain notes or flags to help you quickly find the most important details. If you add notes you should use a different colour pen and make a note of the date that the new notes were added.

Examiners often like to see plots of data. If you have plots on your computer that are not in your notebook, print out the plots or bring your laptop so they can be shown to the examiners if asked.

Discussion and Questions

Discussion during the oral exam is wide ranging, and may include questions about basic physics, equipment, methods, analysis, results and uncertainties. We may ask you to go to the blackboard and write something as part of your explanation. We do not ask for deep understanding of theory, but you should be familiar with the basic physics, e.g. as is often discussed in Introduction or Theory sections of the experiment write-ups.

Here are some examples of what you might be asked (but far from an exclusive list):

Keep in mind that it is possible that none of the examiners will be an expert on a particular experiment under discussion. Your explanations should be clear and thorough enough so that a non-expert with a general physics background can understand what you are talking about.

Stay on time

Timing during the exam is critical and we must stay on schedule. Please do not be offended if we interrupt during the exam. We stick to the schedule, so we may sometimes seem abrupt.

When the exam is over, you will be asked to leave the room and close the door, so that the examiners may discuss your performance. Marks are first determined independently by each examiner; your final mark is calculated as the average of the three individual marks. When all the oral exams are complete, the course coordinator checks all the marks to ensure that marking is consistent for all the different panels of examiners.