Exam scores

This morning I called the INFN secretary in Frascati, to obtain the scores of the two written tests I took last week and the evaluation of my career titles. The scores of written tests and titles are summed together with the score of the final oral exam (which I will take next Monday) to give a total score which determines the ranking of the candidates.

There are 16 positions to fill, and after the written tests 24 candidates have been admitted to the oral examinations. I do not have the score of each of the other physicists who passed the written tests (in Italy a law forbids this, for the sake of privacy), but we are trying to reconstruct the ranking via e-mail... I only have scores for 10 others.

My career titles were rated 46/50, which is pretty high - but I believe it reflects the fact that at 39 years of age, and with 6 years of post-PhD research activity, I am objectively over-qualified for the position offered.

I got 43/60 on the first written test, the one with 42 nightmarish exercises to complete in 4 hours - again, more than I expected. The 42 questions were divided in four blocks (detectors, accelerators, statistics, particle physics) and the commissaries provided us with the total score available for each block, so post-mortem I had been able to compute, with fair approximation, that my total score should have been around 39/60. Evidently, they were forced to rescale the scores upwards a bit, to allow 24 candidates to surpass the minimum admission threshold of 36/60 per written test.

In the last written test, the one where I discussed the CDF calorimeter and its use for the top quark mass measurements, they gave me 56/60, again a high score.

The total, 145/170, will be summed to the xx/80 points allotted for the oral exam. So, in principle none of the 24 candidates (the 11 scores I managed to collect range from 104 to 145) is excluded from the competition. However, I am quite confident that I will remain in the top part of the list, and offering a drink to my colleagues is deferred to next week only as a formal measure.

It remains to be said that I am not yet sure I will accept the position! As I explained a few posts ago, I would rather win a University Research position - and two will open in a few months in Padova, where I would again have good chances. We'll see what happens: it not only depends on the result of my exam - which is not in doubt at this point - but on the result of other candidates who might concur for the University positions in Padova.

Comments

[Dmitry]

Hi Tomasso,

I think I should congratulate Italian system on achieving one of the most objective procedures of obtaining tenure.

You go through exams and you get your score, the highest score wins.

It may seem unfair to subject "mature physicists" like yourself to such an ordeal, but this is fair game.

In the U.S. the things seem to be pre-determined or decided through "networking" and politics (at least at the selection of short list stage).

congratulations and good luck with University position.

[a]

dear Dmitry,
even in Italy most positions are pre-determined: e.g. you can see that an oral exam is considered as more important than career titles. The difference with respect to the US system is that here, thanks to the "objective" procedure, nobody has the responsability of the choices. I doubt this is a better system.