Closing all re-eval requests and inquiries.

Received a re-eval request for phase 3 and this was my response. Am posting here because some of it is general in nature and bears wider dissemination.

Hi D,


I reviewed your Team's submission. Before I go into some detail, let me clarify a couple of things.

1. In each of the 10 grading criteria, a "1" means the submission was "at par" or met expectations. For any given grading characteristic, the majority of groups would have scored a 1. So getting a "1" does not mean you did badly. A "1.5" means the submission was 'above par' on that criterion and a 0.5 means it was 'below par' on that criterion. A "2" (very rare and subjective) means the submission was exceptional on that criterion. Hence, you will see that 1.5 was the maximum score on most criteria because some team or the other, on a relative basis would have done well on some criterion or the other.

2. This year, almost all teams did well. The mean was higher and the variance lower than in past years. I suspect it has partly to do with the example PPTs being put out. People were able to learn from past mistakes better and submit better work than average. But that also meant that the par value went up for the "at par" and "above par" ratings.

Your team did well on most parameters. You were at par on many criteria. The 0.5 you got for ROs was because the ROs were unclear. The DPs seemed uni-dimensional (I didn't cut marks here though) and somewhat narrow given the project scope. However the 1.5 in insights obtained is because, despite being narrow, the ROs seemed to have been fully addressed.

Teams that put in some form of animation so that the sequence of steps comes by itself got a 1.5 on creativity. Groups that were able to integrate their analysis into a clean, reasonable set of recommendations did well in 'results obtained' and 'insights' criteria. And so on.

So overall, I'm sorry to say I do not see scope to change the marks as given. Its not because you did badly but because most other teams did well also and the bar was raised for scoring at 'above par' levels.

I hope that clarifies.

I shall close re-val requests for Phase 3 and its time to release the grades soon.

Sudhir