If you have made it to this round, you should be both thrilled and humbled. Even though there are more hoops to jump through after this, the Oral Assessment (OA) is the last of the rounds in which you have to actually perform well in order to survive. Everything after the OA, aside from paperwork, is out of your hands.
Step 5: The Oral Assessment
Think of the OA as the final round that places you on the cusp of the Foreign Service. The Board of Examiners (BEX) already knows you have the intellect required to do well as a Foreign Service Officer. Passing the FSOT confirmed this. The BEX also believes that you did a better job than the majority of other candidates in your career track of exhibiting the 13 dimensions the Foreign Service deems necessary to be successful FSOs. Advancing past the QEP confirmed this. Now it's up to you to show that you can exhibit these 13 dimensions at a high enough level to warrant receiving a conditional offer of employment.
Yes. This is the most grueling stage of the entire process. It's also the most emotionally charged stage. If you pass the OA, your candidacy will take a giant leap that brings you tantalizingly close to actually entering the Foreign Service. On the other hand, if you fail the OA, your candidacy will come to a frustrating and ignominious end. (And yes, you will have to start all over again at the FSOT whenever you are eligible to take it again.) And unlike failing the FSOT, where you can say the test questions were hard or you ran out of time writing your essay, and unlike failing the QEP, where you can blame "the process" for being too random or too opaque, failing the OA stings a little bit more because the responsibility for failing lies entirely with you. Even though the assessors cannot tell you what you did wrong, you will probably know.
The OA is held in Washington and sometimes at one other major city concurrently. Travel to the OA site and lodging while you are there are solely at your expense. OAs are conducted every day the government is open. There are no OAs on weekends, federal holidays, days on which the government is closed because of bad weather, or days on which the government is closed because of a government shutdown. In the event that your OA is scheduled for a day when the government is closed (typically because of bad weather), you can send an email to reschedule@state.gov and request another date. The size of an OA group can range from about 5 to as large as about 20.
Once you receive the good news about passing the QEP, you will have about one week to sign up for an OA date. The first available OA date for a cohort is about six weeks after receiving the QEP results. The last available OA date for the same cohort is about four months after the first available date. If you have your heart set on signing up for an early date, be ready. When you are finally able to register, the dates at the beginning of the OA window, Mondays and Fridays tend to get chosen quickly. People who are traveling to DC from afar or from abroad tend to choose Mondays or Fridays because it means less of a disruption for them regarding missing work. Anxious candidates also tend to choose the earlier dates in the window so they can get it out of the way.
There are advantages and disadvantages to taking the OA early or late. If you take it early, you can minimize the weeks or months that you will have to deal with the stress. But you also have less time to prepare for it. If you take it late, you will have lots of time to study and practice. However, the OA will linger over your head much longer.
The OA lasts for one full day and has three components: the Group Exercise (GE), the Structured Interview (SI) and the Case Management (CM). OAs start at 7:00 am and finish at about 3:30 pm. You will have about an hour for lunch. The GE is always the first exercise of the OA. After that, whether you do the SI and then the CM or the CM and then the SI is totally random. If your OA is unsuccessful, your day will be over at about 4:00 or 4:30. If you pass the OA, you might be on site until 6:00 or even later. If you are booking flight reservations, it might be a good idea to push your flight back home until later in the evening or even the following day.
Your performance at the OA will be measured by assessors from the BEX. They will evaluate how well you exhibit the 13 dimensions and how well you perform on the OA's three components. Scores can range from 1.0 (weak performance) to 7.0 (strong performance). In order to pass the OA, your overall score needs to be at least a 5.25. All three components are weighted equally. Therefore, you should note that it is still possible to pass the OA even if you score below a 5.25 on one or two components. If you totally rock one part of the OA, that can more than offset weaker performances with the other two components. Similarly, also note that it is still possible to fail the OA even if you score above a 5.25 on two of the components. Doing well with two components will not mean much if you totally bomb the third. And of course, people with high scores may pass all three parts; others candidates with low scores may fail all three parts.
It must be stated that even though 5.25 is the minimum passing score, this does not necessarily mean you should pack your bags and get ready for your new career as a diplomat in Washington. There are a few other steps involved, the last of which being the cruelest--particularly during these times of Congressional gridlock and federal budget cuts--especially for candidates whose OA scores are relatively low (5.3 to 5.5).
But we can worry about that later. For now, let's focus on the OA itself and scoring that 5.25.
To be continued...
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