How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

uators to use different standards. This complex, nonlinear method speaks to the pragmatic character of evaluation, which is driv ...

not to support this proposal, even though you don’t agree with it methodologically. Finally, comparing two years of service on a ...

meetings is for the low score to listen very carefully to what the higher scores are saying, particularly if the higher scores a ...

ciplines garner awards much less frequently—in part because these are small fields that generate far fewer applicants—may feel l ...

portant enough to require that program officers and some panelists repair relationships among evaluators.^33 Members of these pa ...

what is important from what is obscure. The rule of deference is also voided when more than one person claims expertise.^34 As w ...

Such conflicts have to be managed with great care, to ensure that col- laboration remains possible until the collective task of ...

past conflicts, interpersonal hatreds, and the like. Arguably, in com- parison to other contexts of evaluation, it is on grant p ...

ferent times. The characteristics that are shared by any one batch of proposals vary and may make different criteria of evaluati ...

scribes a proposal that some thought was methodologically unso- phisticated, yet that also seemed somehow grand and highly ambi- ...

feels his panel was biased in favor of more humanistic social sciences, so that a proposal with a multi-causal model was penaliz ...

was not privy to. She finds it disturbing that other panelists were re- luctant to take a further look at the proposal, and that ...

Extraneous Influences on Panel Outcomes An array of other factors not directly related to the content of pro- posals can influen ...

as measured by, for example, how successfully she is able to cham- pion a particular proposal—is important to each evaluator’s s ...

a very powerful influence.” Aggressiveness, stubbornness, and deter- mination can be a potent combination, quite apart from how ...

stereotyping on panels to a white interviewer, especially since, as was true of most respondents, they did not know of my academ ...

tone the testosterone down. Seriously, the year before this was not... [like that].” Of the other women panelists, she notes, “W ...

why I thought it was really good” might be interpreted by outsiders as an example of personal influence violating the norms of f ...

circles. As one panelist, a historian, explains, such familiarity can be welcome: The person that I felt closest to was the pers ...

Chance. Although panelists view their deliberations as legitimate and fair, they also acknowledge an element of randomness in th ...