Scholarship Evaluation

AprilHaynes
AprilHaynes Posts: 7 ✭✭
Third Compass Anniversary 10-Year Anniversary Summit 2024 5 Likes
edited December 2022 in Grants & Scholarships

This is the first year we are having evaluators review and evaluate scholarship applications online.

  1. Would anyone be willing to share correspondence sent to committees introducing first time online evaluations? (Example emails, instructions, etc.)
  2. In the past staff has created a cover sheet and attached all supplemental documentation along with an evaluation form that is sent to all committees. Now that we are going online we are struggling as to what we should provide them. Once committee members evaluate their particular scholarship applications, our committees then meet in person.
  3. Are your committee members responsible for printing all documentation to bring to meetings or do you provide a report of some kind (average evaluation scores, etc.) that they can use at the meeting? Examples of what you provide to committees would be extremely helpful.

Answers

  • BethNuttall
    BethNuttall Posts: 53 ✭✭✭
    Groundbreaker Third Compass Anniversary 10 Comments 5 Answers

    I have attached the text of the email we sent to our reviewers last year. I strongly recommend that you include the video tutorial. All of our reviewers said the system was easy to use and did not have any issues.

    We provide a master spreadsheet during our review meeting that is not shared in advance (we organize the spreadsheet from highest ranked to lowest ranked for each scholarship). We just share our screen with the spreadsheet via Zoom. We provide reviewers with a list of scholarships, their descriptions and eligibility before the review meeting. We ask that they make note of any applicants they felt were particularly noteworthy, outstanding, or problematic to confirm that this feedback has been included in final scholarship decisions. 


  • RhondaThomson
    RhondaThomson Posts: 53 ✭✭✭
    World Traveler Scholarship Lifecycle Manager (SLM) Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) Third Compass Anniversary
    edited February 2022

    Hi @AprilHaynes. Hope this helps! This is what I send to them, along with a video tutorial (it wouldn't let me upload it here) of a side by side evaluation in the GLM/SLM.

    We do not have a committee meeting, so far. We moved to Foundant to get away from all the paper, so I would probably bring it up on the screen in our boardroom if we were meeting in person.

    Please feel free to ask more questions!

    Rhonda

  • LizMcClure
    LizMcClure Posts: 9 ✭✭
    Conversation Starter Scholarship Lifecycle Manager (SLM) 10 Comments Second Compass Anniversary

    We are pretty similar to the above responses. Before COVID, we met in person and I would pull up a master spreadsheet on our projector that had the students ranked by average score. I would also print a copy of the spreadsheet for them to have right in front of them. I would provide them with a simplified version of the master spreadsheet to use for notetaking while they reviewed the applications so some one would bring those to the meeting if they had written down notes or comments.

    Covid of course pushed our meetings to Zoom and the consensus from our committee is that the meeting runs more efficiently and is easier to attend so we'll be keeping it that way going forward. I share my screen with the master spreadsheet and have shown our committee members how they can use the custom columns to display their comments in their reviewer dashboard so they don't need to print anything.

    Attached is a copy of our master spreadsheets - SR is for our merit/other requirement scholarships and Financial Need is for our strictly need-based awards.


  • MarshaStrauss
    MarshaStrauss Posts: 82 ✭✭✭
    Voter Scholarship Lifecycle Manager (SLM) 10 Comments 25 Likes

    I'm currently in the stage of creating the evaluation form for our UA. Brand new to SLM and having the whole process run by the foundation overall. So it's big changes in all directions. We will take advantage of our trainer giving a training session to our evaluators and go from there. I plan to keep things simple and minimal wordiness. I don't like it for myself and try my best to avoid dishing it out. I guess we'll see. Thanks for the examples and conversation here!