To weight or not to weight?

Experience has shown that having differential weights on criteria leads to proponents spending more time and effort on these and thus doing a poor job on “other” criteria.  These “other” criteria are, however, critical to the success of the overall program and should not be neglected.

It is essential, then, to design the system to make the criteria roughly equal.  If one criterion is felt to be “bigger” it can usually be broken into two smaller components which will result in an easier job for both the proponents and the reviewers.