Manual Assignments vs. Smart Assignments

In ReviewRoom, applications can be assigned to reviewers in one of two ways: manually or automatically via Smart Assignments. From time to time, we receive questions from our users asking when it’s best to use smart assignments vs. manual assignments.

In this blog post, we will discuss some potential use cases for smart assignments. But first, let’s define what we mean by “manual” and “smart” assignments.

What’s a Manual Assignment?

A manual assignment is when the Room’s administrator, or designated individual, manually assigns an application to a reviewer. This is fine for smaller competitions, but for Rooms that receive hundreds of applications a day, this could be a major bottleneck.

What’s a Smart Assignment?

Smart assignments are rule based. You can tell ReviewRoom to automatically assign applications that fit a certain criteria to certain reviewer groups. Here are some example use cases for smart assignments:

Use Cases for Smart Assignments

Joyce’s National Educational Grant

Joyce is managing an educational grant that is accepting applications from students all across Canada. Each province has different criteria that must be met by applicants in order to be considered. As well, each province has its own group of reviewers that will decide which student will be considered for the grant.

Since her grant receives dozens of applications each day, Joyce has decided to use Smart Assignments to automatically assign applications based on the province of origin to the respective reviewer group. For example, ReviewRoom will send the applications originating from the province of Alberta to the reviewer group based in Alberta.

Mark’s Photography Contest

Mark teaches a small photography class in University and has decided to run a year-end contest for his students. His speciality is colour photography, but his assistant is more skilled at interpreting and grading black & white photographs.

Mark created a form in ReviewRoom that asks the student if they are submitting a colour photograph, or a black & white photograph. Based on the response to this question, ReviewRoom will automatically assign the photo contest entry to either Mark or to his assistant for grading.

Additional Reading

If you would like to learn more about Smart Assignments, be sure to read our full blog post on this feature here.