Feature Spotlight: Reviewing

When we designed our centralized reviewing interface, our goal was to help both reviewers and administrators make the best awarding decisions possible, as quickly as possible. So administrators can take advantage of the customization options they need, while reviewers benefit from a simple, streamlined, and easy-to-use interface.

A paper-based review process just can’t compete with the time savings, accuracy, flexibility, and insights offered by AwardSpring’s online review process. Here are just a few of the ways that AwardSpring’s reviewing features improve upon a paper-based process:

Bias Elimination & Time Savings

Before the review cycle begins, administrators can hide certain pieces of student information from reviewers, like name, email address, and financial details, to eliminate any potential bias. Administrators can also hide select application responses from reviewers. We recommend hiding any responses that don’t directly pertain to your scorecards; that way, your reviewers won’t waste any time reading responses that won’t impact their evaluation.

Personalized Review Methods 

The AwardSpring platform offers you two different ways to conduct reviews: a global review or a scholarship-specific review. With global review, each applicant is considered individually using the same scorecards and review committee members across all scholarships. A scholarship-specific review requires reviewers to assess every candidate for a given scholarship individually. This review style allows for more fine-tuning of your process, including create different scorecards and assigning unique review committees for each scholarship, but it can take longer to complete.

If you have lots of scholarships, you’ll save quite a bit of time using global review. That’s because each student application will go through just one review cycle, no matter how many scholarships the student is eligible for. On the other hand, a scholarship-specific review is essential for those scholarships with that need a specific review committee or have unique qualifications. Luckily, you can get the best of both worlds: use global review for those scholarships that can share the same scorecard and review committee, and then conduct a scholarships-specific review of the rest of your scholarships.

Simple, Adaptable Scorecards

Our online score cards are designed to be flexible, easy-to-use translations of your old paper rubric. Using simple labels eliminates scrolling for reviewers, which can save a surprising amount of time. If you need to include more context or explanation of your scorecard methodology, we recommend that you provide it in a separate document to keep the reviewing experience as simple as possible.

Flexible Reviewer Assignments

Choose your assignment methodology - random, all, or manual - with a single click in AwardSpring. If you have more than 50 applicants, or lots of reviewers, we recommend assigning reviewers randomly. Small review team? Choose “all” so that all reviewers will see all of the applications. And if you have a scholarship that requires a specific review team, you can always select “manual” to make your assignments on a per-reviewer basis.

Quick & Seamless Reviewing Experience

Every detail of the AwardSpring reviewing experience was designed to help reviewers work quickly, accurately, and without unnecessary distractions. As your reviewers make their way through each application, their work is saved automatically, so there’s no chance of losing a single score. Navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the page make it easy to move on to the next application. And if a reviewer wants to take notes to explain a score, remind herself about something, or share an idea with the administrator, she can do so right in the scorecard - and the note will be kept private from everyone except the author and the administrator.

Insightful Awarding & Denying

Designed to help administrators make faster decisions, AwardSpring’s Award & Deny screen gives you deep insights into your applicant pool without a lot of complication. Pre-filter your applicant list for secondary preferences, which can help you please donors or make tie-breaker decisions. Once reviewer scores are in, your applicant list will automatically re-sort to bring the highest scored students to the top. Hover over a student’s overall score to see just how many individual scores are in from reviewers, or click on a student’s name to see all of the individual scores. The wealth of information available at the Award & Deny stage will help you - and your donors - feel confident about your awarding decisions.

If you or your review team ever have questions about how to optimize your customized AwardSpring platform for the best reviewing experience, or if you’d like a refresher training course, just send us a note at support@awardspring.com.