Another key concept of evaluation is the principle of transparency. The evaluation criteria are usually specified in the call. Point by point, the criteria adopted both in qualitative and quantitative terms of the score are identified and clarified right from the beginning.
Finally, the last principle that we can recall is independence. Evaluations are usually carried out by experts external to the organization that finances, to guarantee their impartiality concerning the projects and the absence of conflicts of interest. To this end, the European Commission has created a list of experts from the various countries, regularly adopted for each call.
In this database, the experts indicate their curriculum and their fields of interest. At the time of the call, however, you are asked to declare if there are potential conflicts of interest because your institution has applied for the same call or if in carrying out the work it emerges that you know any of the operators or partners who were not initially known. In this case the project is assigned to another evaluator.
The evaluation process, therefore, takes place with the assignment of a certain number of projects to two experts. Evaluations usually take place in a set score in hundredths. Each project is evaluated by two experts who work independently. The two scores are mathematically averaged over the final result. If in the outcome of the two evaluations, one realizes that there is a variation in the score greater than thirty points, then a third independent evaluator takes over whose score will make the average with the one that is closest to his score. The evaluation is expressed both in comments and in a score from zero to 100. Therefore, in the first phase, the evaluators proceed autonomously, then in the second phase they must agree on a so-called consolidated evaluation, i.e. they must agree with the final result. The outcome of the average sometimes does not perfectly reflect the opinion about a project, especially where one evaluator is in favour of admitting it and the other is not. The evaluation in the narrative part must in fact be consistent with the score expressed in numbers.
There are often well-done projects that, however, fail to obtain a useful score to be admitted given the great competition on certain calls, and so both the strengths and weaknesses of the project must be highlighted. To give a concrete example, let us now examine a call for the Erasmus plus program, which is one of the best-known and most popular programs in recent years.
(to be continued)
article by Giuseppina Rossi, Senior project evaluator for the European Commission