Week 4: The Score Is Not the Story
You have been waiting for this.
Not the summary statement — that comes later. Right now, you are waiting for the score.
You have been checking eRA Commons more often than you would admit to anyone. Refreshing. Scanning. Telling yourself you are not anxious while doing the thing anxious people do. And then, roughly 48 to 72 hours after your study section meets, it appears. A number. Or two letters: ND.
No critiques. No context. No explanation. Just the score.
If you were triaged — if you see that ND — the blow is immediate and specific. Your application was not discussed. It will not be discussed. You will eventually receive written critiques from your assigned reviewers, but the room never heard your science presented, debated, or defended. That is its own kind of silence, and it deserves its own conversation. For now, I am talking to those of you who received a score.
You have a number. And for the next several weeks — sometimes up to 30 days — that number is all you have.
What happens in the gap
This is the period no one prepares you for.
You have a score but no summary statement. No critiques to read. No reviewer comments to parse. Just a number and everything your mind decides to do with it.
Some of you will try to calculate whether you are in a fundable range. If your application went to an institute that publishes a payline, you may be able to measure your score against a clear threshold. But not every institute operates that way. NCI, for example, no longer publishes a payline. If your application is there, you are sitting with a number and no line to hold it against — just your best guess about where funding decisions have landed in recent cycles, conversations with program officers, and whatever you can piece together from colleagues who have been through this before.
Some of you will construct a full narrative about what happened in the room. A score of 25 and you are already writing the resubmission in your head. A score of 40 and you have decided the reviewers did not understand your approach. A score in the low 20s and you are oscillating between hope and the fear of hoping.
All of this is natural. None of it is useful. Because the story you are building is based on a single number, and a single number cannot tell you what actually happened in that room.
The score tells you where you landed. It does not tell you why. It does not tell you what your reviewers praised, what concerned them, where they disagreed with each other, or what the broader panel thought when the discussion opened to the room. It does not tell you whether your score reflected a unified assessment or a compromise between reviewers who saw your application very differently.
The score is the ending. The summary statement — when it arrives — is the story.
When the summary statement arrives
Weeks later, your summary statement posts to eRA Commons. By now, you have been living with your score long enough to have built an interpretation around it. You may have already decided what went wrong, what went right, and what you would change.
I need you to recognize that for what it is: a narrative you constructed in the absence of information. The summary statement is about to tell you whether the story you built was accurate. Let it.
Your summary statement contains several layers, and the order in which you encounter them matters.
The Resume: the room's voice
The first substantive section you will read is the Resume and Summary of Discussion. This is not an individual reviewer's opinion. It is a compressed account of what the panel — the full room — discussed about your application. The strengths the panel endorsed. The weaknesses that were raised during the open discussion. The overall impression the room carried when the conversation ended.
Most applicants read the Resume quickly and move on to the individual critiques. That is a mistake.
The Resume tells you something the individual critiques cannot: what the room coalesced around. Your three assigned reviewers each bring their own lens, their own expertise, their own priorities. But the Resume reflects what survived the discussion — the points that were raised and affirmed by the broader panel, not just a single reader.
If a strength appears in the Resume, it means the room agreed on it. That is something you protect in a resubmission — you do not rewrite what already worked.
If a weakness appears in the Resume, it means it was raised in the open discussion and considered significant enough to document. That weakness influenced scores beyond your three assigned reviewers. Every eligible panelist who scored your application heard it. Pay attention to the specific language. If the Resume says concerns were "minor and can be addressed," that is a different signal than if it describes a weakness without qualification. If the Resume says the weaknesses "did not significantly diminish the strengths," that tells you something about the relative weight the room placed on what went right versus what needs fixing.
The Resume is the closest thing you will ever have to a transcript of what happened in that room. Read it like one.
The individual critiques: where the strategy lives
After the Resume, you will find the written critiques from each assigned reviewer — typically three. Under the Simplified Review Framework, each reviewer evaluates your application across three factors rather than five separate criteria. Factor 1, Importance of the Research, encompasses both Significance and Innovation and receives a single criterion score. Factor 2, Rigor and Feasibility, covers your Approach and also receives a criterion score. Factor 3, Expertise and Resources, evaluates whether the investigative team and institutional environment are adequate for the proposed work — but it is not scored numerically. It is assessed as either appropriate or as having gaps that require explanation.
This means that when you scan the individual critiques, you will see numerical scores for two factors, not five. And the evaluation of your team and your environment — which under the old framework could quietly drag down or lift up a score — is now a sufficiency judgment. Either the reviewer found your team and resources adequate for what you proposed, or they identified specific gaps. There is no gradient. There is no 3 that you have to interpret.
That structural change matters for how you read strategically. Your criterion scores now map directly to two questions: Is this research important enough to fund? And can it be done well? Everything else is context.
This is where most applicants make their first strategic error.
The mistake of reading for emotion. When you open the individual critiques for the first time, you are not reading. You are scanning for pain. Your eyes catch "weakness," "concern," "not well justified," "unclear." Each one lands in your chest before it lands in your brain.
This is compounded by the weeks you have already spent processing the score. You are not arriving at this document fresh. You are arriving with a story already in place, and your brain will look for the parts of the critiques that confirm it.
The first read should not count. Read it, feel whatever you feel, close the document, and walk away. Come back the next day — or two days later — when you can read it as a strategist rather than as the person who wrote the thing being evaluated.
I am not being poetic. I am being practical. I have watched talented investigators derail a strong resubmission because they read their summary statement once, in a state of emotional reactivity, and built their revision around the wrong critique.
The mistake of treating every comment as equal. Not every critique carries the same weight. This is the thing early-career investigators most consistently get wrong — they treat the individual critiques as a list of problems to fix, assign equal importance to every one, and try to address all of them in the resubmission.
Some critiques are observations. Some are concerns. And some are the reason your score landed where it did.
An observation sounds like: "The investigator could consider including additional covariates in the analysis." A reviewer noted something they thought of. It may or may not have affected their criterion score. Worth acknowledging in a resubmission, but it did not move the needle.
A concern sounds like: "The sampling strategy may limit generalizability to the target population." A reviewer identified something they see as a genuine limitation. It affected their assessment of Rigor and Feasibility. It needs to be addressed substantively — not just acknowledged, but resolved or defended.
The reason your score landed where it did sounds like: "The conceptual basis for the intervention is not well articulated, making it difficult to evaluate whether the proposed approach will achieve the stated outcomes." That is a reviewer telling you the foundation of your application did not hold. That is not a signal to add a paragraph. That is a signal that the core argument needs to be rebuilt.
Learning to distinguish between these three levels is the single most important skill in reading a summary statement. And it is a skill — which means it can be learned, and it improves with practice. It is one of the skills I teach in the Lost in Translation Grantsmanship Curriculum.
The mistake of ignoring the disagreement. You have three reviewers. Their scores for Importance of the Research may not align. One reviewer may have found your significance argument compelling and your innovation clear. Another may have scored the same factor markedly lower, finding the innovation incremental or the significance overstated. Under Rigor and Feasibility, one reviewer may have identified no weaknesses. Another may have listed several.
This is disorienting. It can feel like they read different applications.
In a sense, they did.
Reviewers read your application through the lens of their own expertise, their own scientific priorities, their own standards for what constitutes sufficient justification. A methodologist scrutinizes your analytic plan at a level of detail a content expert may not. A reviewer whose work focuses on a different population may question your sampling frame in ways someone closer to your field would not.
When reviewers disagree, the instinct is to dismiss the harshest critique as an outlier. Resist that instinct.
Instead, ask: what is the specific gap in my application that made this divergence possible? If one reviewer found the importance of my research compelling and another did not, what was I not explicit enough about that allowed two reasonable scientists to reach opposite conclusions?
Reviewer disagreement is almost never about one reviewer being right and another being wrong. It is about your application leaving enough ambiguity that reasonable people could fill it differently. And ambiguity, in a resubmission, is yours to close.
How to read it like a reviewer
Here is the process I use, and the one I teach:
Read it once for emotion. Put it away.
Read it a second time starting with the Resume. What did the room agree on? What strengths do you protect? What weaknesses were significant enough to be captured in the panel's collective voice?
Read the individual critiques with a highlighter, marking every concern that appears in more than one review. If two out of three reviewers raised the same issue, that issue is real, regardless of how it was worded. Convergent critique is the most reliable signal in a summary statement.
Read it again and categorize each critique: observation, concern, or foundation. If you are honest with yourself — and this part requires honesty — you will find that you already know which category most of them belong to. The ones you want to argue with are usually the ones that matter most.
Then — and only then — build your resubmission strategy. Not around fixing everything. Around fixing the things that will most change how your application reads in the room when a reviewer stands up with it in their hands and four minutes to make your case.
Because that is still where this is heading.
What to carry forward
Your summary statement is not a grade. It is not a verdict. It is the most honest, most granular feedback your science will ever receive from people who evaluated it with no personal stake in whether you succeed.
The researchers who build funded programs are not the ones who never receive critical feedback. They are the ones who learned to read it clearly, sort it strategically, and use it to make the next version of their work undeniable.
Next week: the resubmission decision. When to revise, when to reframe, and when to walk away.
~Lisa Carter-Bawa, PhD, MPH, APRN, ANP-C, FAAN, FSBM
More insights at https://www.lisacarterbawa.com/insights
