Learn English – Hit ‘in’ or hit ‘on’ (one’s head)

How is the most natural sounding way to phrase this question, which is a little odd in a way because you could literally answer "How would you rate yourself on the scale from 1 to 10" with something like "I would pick a number between 1 and 10 that seemed to match my self-image in this respect" and be technically correct. You probably wouldn't get the job in most cases. That ambiguity doesn't exist if you phrase the question with "What" but even so a native English speaker would choose the former every time.

What would fit into the middle of a sentence better:

"On a scale from 1 to 10, what rating would you give yourself?"

I would tend to use a scale from 1 to 10. The only situation where I can think I would use a scale of would be to describe the size of a map or diagram- "This map is drawn at a scale of 1:20000" - if I'm describing a range it would always be "from 5 to 100."

Edit: Also notice that it is always a scale from 1 to 10 rather than the scale. You would only use "the" if you were describing a particular scale - for example "What is the wind speed on the Beaufort Scale?" In this case we are using an abstract scale that is defined by the question, so it is "a scale".

"Hit/clout/slap round the head" is a UK idiom. It doesn't imply once or more than once.

Examples from the BNC: "clouted it very hard round the head with his stick"; "clouting him round the head"; "getting a tap round the head"; "who beats you round the head"; "Because you can't wallop them round the head can you?" and so on.

There's a more specific form "round the ear": this is nearly always "clip round the ear" (17 times in the BNC) but also "smack", "clout" and "belt" (6 instances in total). ("Clip" meaning a blow only occurs in this one phrase, as far as I know, but as a verb it can be used to mean "make an accidental, glancing contact", as "I clipped it with my mirror as I went past".)

Quite why we say "round" is not clear: it is certainly an aphetic form of the preposition "around". It doesn't seem to occur with other body parts than heads and ears (there are a few possible instances in the BNC, but they all might be interpreted as a literal "around"). It doesn't seem to imply any particular part of the head, or multiple blows "all round the head", as one might have supposed.