  The most stringent test of theoretical models of the first-order Fermi
mechanism at collisionless astrophysical shocks is a comparison of the
theoretical predictions with observational data on particle populations. Such
comparisons have yielded good agreement between observations at the
quasi-parallel portion of the Earth's bow shock and three theoretical
approaches, including Monte Carlo kinetic simulations. This paper extends such
model testing to the realm of oblique interplanetary shocks: here observations
of proton and alpha particle distributions made by the SWICS ion mass
spectrometer on Ulysses at nearby interplanetary shocks are compared with test
particle Monte Carlo simulation predictions of accelerated populations. The
plasma parameters used in the simulation are obtained from measurements of
solar wind particles and the magnetic field upstream of individual shocks. Good
agreement between downstream spectral measurements and the simulation
predictions are obtained for two shocks by allowing the the ratio of the
mean-free scattering length to the ionic gyroradius, to vary in an optimization
of the fit to the data. Generally small values of this ratio are obtained,
corresponding to the case of strong scattering. The acceleration process
appears to be roughly independent of the mass or charge of the species.
