Some typical questions during exams at UZH:

• Questions about your analysis (obviously).
  • Is the uncertainty in your result statistically or systematically driven? (Yuta's favorite.)
  • Specifics about certain systematics (nuisance parameters).
  • What is the theoretical or experimental motivation of your model, or your particular chosen set of parameter values?
  • Variations of your signal model, e.g. different mass or coupling parameters.
  • What is the broader context of your model in other experiments? This can be past, current or future experiments like LEP, Tevatron or LH-LHC. How would your signal show up there? What exclusions do they give?
  • How would your signal and analysis change with more luminosity or higher center of mass energy? (Future colliders.)
  • Questions on the process, like the color flow of Feynman diagram, or parton (like initial b quark) coming from the protons (see PDFs below), …
• Detector / accelerations questions:
  • PDFs at LHC (quark, b quark, gluon content of proton and anti-proton), see bottom plots.
  • Difference between LHC and LEP or Tevatron; advantages/disadvantages, production mechanisms, …
  • How is luminosity measured? (PhD-level)
• Higgs physics
  • In particular the different production mechanism at the LHC or LEP.
  • If you are very unlucky the Higgs mechanism. See e.g. the cross section plots here or this paper.
• Especially for PhD exams:
  • About anything you wrote in your thesis.
  • SM Lagrangians (see page 8), or maybe that of your BSM signal model.
  • Hadronization (formation of jet).
  • Statistics at the LHC: type of test statistics, how to get exclusion limits (upper limits), …
  • Details about your object reconstruction & identification algorithms (taus, jets, b tagging, …)
• …

• You will notice that often the questions are asked awkwardly, and they will repeat them, because the examiner is phishing for a very particular word or phrase.
• If you do not know what they are looking for, or you do not understand the question, just ask to clarify, and try to have more of an active discussion than an interrogation.
• As a “cheat” or “hack”, you can prepare a lot of material in the back up of your presentation.