Grant Assessment Worksheet
Use the criteria that the funding agency will use to assess your proposal.
Below are some standard criteria for evaluating proposals. Use the "Points to Consider" to guide your evaluation of a your proposal--and your colleague's proposals.
Use the Potential Problems to jumpstart the revew process.
|
Points to Consider: |
Notes: |
Potential Problems |
|
Severity of Need
• Are your needs more dire than other agencies competing for a grant?
|
|
|
|
Shared Mission
• How will your grant match the mission of the grantor? Is your project aligned with their ultimate goals?
|
|
|
|
Consistency/Evidence
• What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity?
• Does it advance knowledge within the field or across different fields?
• Do you understand the problem as well as the solution?
• Can you follow the problem from start to resolution?
• What, if any, are the broader impacts?
• Does the project promote teaching and learning?
|
|
|
|
Methodology
|
|
|
|
Accountability
• Can you deliver evaluations and conclusions on time?
• Remember that you will be obligated to do whatever you proposed in your application. |
|
|
|
Competence
• Does your team have the skills and qualifications needed to complete the task?
• Do you have sufficient access to resources?
|
|
|
|
Cost Effectiveness
• Do you show that you will efficiently use the grant dollars?
|
|
|
|
Project Readiness:
• Do you have all approvals, zoning permits, legislative and bureaucratic approvals.
|
|
|
|
Eligible Matches:
• Do you have matching funds?
• Do these matching funds follow the guidelines set forth by the grantor? |
|
|
These are common problems mentioned by grant reviewers:
• Problem not important enough
• Study not likely to produce useful information
• Studies based on shaky hypotheses or data
• Alternative hypotheses not considered
• Methods unsuited to the objective
• Problem more complex than investigator appears to realize.
• Too little detail in the research plan to convince reviewers the investigator knows what he or she is doing, i.e., no recognition of potential problems and pitfalls.
• Over-ambitious research plan with an unrealistically large amount of work.
• Direction or sense of priority not clearly defined, i.e., experiments do not follow from one another and lack a clear starting or finishing point.
• Lack of focus in hypotheses, aims, and or research plan.
• Lack of original or new ideas.
• Investigator too inexperienced with the proposed techniques.
• Proposal driven by technology, i.e., a method in search of a problem.
• Rationale for experiments not provided, i.e., why they are important or how they are relevant to the hypothesis.
• Experiments too dependent on success of an initial proposed experiment. Lack of alternative methods in case the primary approach does not work out.
• Insufficient consideration of statistical needs.
• Not clear which data were obtained by the investigator and which reported by others.
Source: National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases 10/28/2003