Strange/funny/bizarre NSF GRFP reviews?

[cogpsy]

Hi all,

Haven't been on here in a while, but I was hoping for your help. I coordinate the grad students NSF application process for people in my department, and one thing that I consistently have trouble conveying is that your reviewers may not be able to give their full attention to your essay. Of course, since reviewers are smart, capable people, none of the first years believe me

Now, I'm not trying to start a conversation about whether NSF reviewers are good or bad -- my perspective has always been that NSF reviewers (for the GRFP and beyond) are super smart and super well-read, but that they're also human. Having to read so many applications in a row must hurt their brains, and I can't imagine writing so many comments in such a short time.

That said, there are a lot of reviews that just don't make any sense! I'm talking about reviews that reference different projects than those reported; reviews that consist of the same sentence copied and pasted 10x; reviews that are incomprehensibly garbled; reviews that are just plain strange (e.g., "the applicant's broader impacts were lacking because his proposed reserach relied on a dependent measure was linguistic in nature, which just isn't that interesting")

Anyway, I'm hoping to compile all these whacky reviews to share with future applicants. They're also hopefully good for a laugh (or a vent!).

So, if you had any strange reviews, please post them! I'd really appreciate it (and feel free to add context in need be).

Edited April 5, 2012 by cogpsy

[Tsujiru]

Hello cogpsy,

I've heard many, many examples of reviewers alternating between she/he and him/her all within a single review.

In my own reviews there wasn't anything too funny. One person clearly excerpted parts of my essays and maintained the original capitalization and grammar from my activities list, as in "applicant has been a Science Correspondent". They also stated that I was fluent in Japanese and ASL, when in reality I am fluent in Japanese and Spanish, and still a student of ASL and Portuguese (neither Spanish nor Portuguese were mentioned at all by the reviewer). There was a fairly confusing line in my IM review, though I think I got the general gist of it, which was "The apparent preliminary studies have confirmed use of RNAi in aim 1 will be critical to evaluate behavioral-molecular relationship." My references were meant to convey that RNAi is a well established technique in my model organism, but clearly you can't expect reviewers to have time to seriously study your references.