Selectus Feature Focus: ABC-Rating

In our Feature Focus series, we’ll be reporting periodically on interesting features and functionalities in Selectus that facilitate the work of the selection committee and administration.

In this article, we introduce you to the ABC rating, the core of committee members’ individual assessment of applications.

With the ABC rating, all committee members submit a rating for each application prior to the committee meeting. The members do not see the rating of the others until after the rating deadline in anonymized form. This prevents any – conscious or unconscious – mutual influence, and the perspectives of all commission members are taken into account.

Important in the academic context is also the abstention option: if a committee member is conflicted about a particular application, he or she has the option to explicitly abstain.

During the decision-making phase, i.e. at the committee meeting, the ratings of the committee members are presented visually in anonymized form. The application list can also be sorted with the highest rated applications appearing at the top. In this way, applications with no chance of success can be identified immediately, and the valuable meeting time can be used to discuss the most promising applications.

An additional benefit: By performing the rating in advance, the committee members already familiarize themselves with the individual applications before the meeting and attend the meeting well-prepared. (Read our Case Study to learn about the experience of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Zurich).

By the way: to complement the ABC rating you can use theReview Tool, which allows you to implement criteria-based ratings by committee members.