3 ms·
The one missing part of your understanding: grants are generally reviewed by researcher-peers, not really "funding institutions". Your proposal is read by other
by macrael 11y ago
The one missing part of your understanding: grants are generally reviewed by researcher-peers, not really "funding institutions". Your proposal is read by other researches, scores are given to the grant and then a cutoff score is determined. All grants above that score are funded, those below are not.
This doesn't really change your conclusion, that grant writing is an important skill for acquiring funding but it's not about impressing the funding institution, it's about impressing fellow scientists.
- danieltillett 11y agoThe only problem is the scoring system is highly biased towards track record of the grant applicant not the actual grant content. On top of this once you get the grant you can in practice spend the money doing whatever you want. More fundamentally the peer review process can't actually accurately sort good proposals from outstanding proposals, but we only have the money to fund a fraction of the outstanding proposals. Under these conditions just being honest and moving to a system where all good proposals are put into a lottery and funded by chance would be better approach.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoSee also http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431