Unforth's Guide to Peer Review Notes

[unforth]

For those who don't know, I'm in Syracuse, participating in the Peer Review process for the 21st CCLC grants (the ones I went crazy writing in February and March). I've now read my alloted 10 (25 pages each; I've read 10 in the past 37 hours; I've worked for more than 24 of those hours). Three have been pretty good. Three have been average. And four, a lucky four, have ranged from dreadful to appalling. Which I'm too tired to spell right. So now I present: Guide to My Comments.
"Good" - Good.
"Great" - Great.
"Wow!" - That's pretty impressive!
"Yay!" - Wow, that is phenomenally unimpressive.
"?" - I'm not even sure what this means!
"Uh..." - This makes no sense.
"No" - No
"Really" - Are you sure about that?
"Oh rly?" - Absolutely not, no, not a chance, you have no clue what you're talking about.
"Not Reasonable" - Have you worked in a school before? Ever?
"OMG" - How could you even write that?
"OMFG" - This is so unbelievablely unreasonable that my astonishment is inexpressible.
"Data?" - Do you have any evidence of what you're saying at all??
"WTF" - What possessed you to ever even vaguely believe this might possibly be relevent?
"Plug-n-Play" - Nice boiler plate. But, uh, gotcha.
(music notes) - Now that is some mighty impressive data manipulation skillz.

Sadly, due to the nature of the Peer Review Process, the people I'm reviewing will never see these, or any of my far more relevent, comments written on to their grants - the copies I'm reading will be shredded by the end of next week. All they'll get is the sanitized (read: "informative") versions in their evaluation sheets. Now, I ask you, what fun is that? My only consolation is that on the worst ones, even my sanitized say things like "This section is a mess" and "THIS IS NOT AN SUSTAINABILITY PLAN!" Ah, fun times.

Comments

[sharonskinner.livejournal.com]

Ah, the joys of grant reviewing. Ain't it grand?

I love your comments AND the definitions of them. I've used the question mark myself, on numerous occasions and written some truly choice comments that were never allowed to see the light of day. Probably just as well. The people who need most to see such comments are the ones who would most likely look at them and say, "That reviewer is crazy and doesn't know what she's talking about!"

[unforth.livejournal.com]

I'm actually enjoying it A LOT and already wondering where I can sign up for doing more. I've learned SO MUCH about the process, good ideas, good sources, good ways to do things...and a lot of "under no circumstances should you..."'s, too. We finish today, and tomorrow I'm gonna sit down with a copy of the RFP and the scoring rubric and write down every single "DO" and "DON'T" that I can think of. :)

Do you really think they would doubt it? At least two of the bad ones were so bad that I find it difficult to imagine that they didn't have some idea of the problems - I was hoping that there thought process was "well, I hope the reviewers don't notice X" rather than "yeah, I'm handing in gold!" But I'll never know, I guess - confidentiality and all that. ;)

[sharonskinner.livejournal.com]

I agree. It's a great learning process! It will positively impact how you write your next proposal. If I weren't so selfish about participating in reviews myself, I'd say everyone who writes proposals should have to go be a reviewer at least once.

I think, like everything else in life, some of those are just green beginners who have no clue and did the best they could, sending it off with a lick and a prayer. But I do think there are those who think what they wrote is gold, even when it's garbage, and they won't ever hear otherwise.

Me, I always look for the comments to see if they can shed light on the weaknesses of my grants. However, I have had reviewer comments come back that completely contradicted one another. So, like with any kind of critique, some of what you get is valuable and some, not so much.