When putting together your ideas and writing down your project to submit for European funding, there comes the doubt on how to make your project likely to get funds. In other words, you need to know how the Erasmus projects get a quality assessment.
Thanks to the experience of the organisations already been working in the field for many years, it is not difficult to find tips and tricks on how to make your Erasmus project in line with the European priorities. We have examined the new Erasmus Plus Guide 2021-2027 to find out what’s new. Now it’s time to go a little bit further.
Erasmus+ Quality Assessment
The official assessment criteria used by the evaluators to assess your application form are not a riddle. You can easily find them into a Guide available online.
The document comes from the European Commission. Let’s have a look at it.
The Role of National Agencies
National Agencies assess proposals with the assistance of independent experts to ensure that only those of the highest quality are eligible for funding and that only organisations/consortia fulfilling specific criteria obtain an accreditation. Thus, the final decision on the selection or rejection of applications and on the granting of accreditations is by the National Agencies.
The Role of Experts
The assessment and selection of grant applications happens on the basis of a peer review system following a transparent process that guarantees impartiality and equal treatment of all applicants.
The assessment is an essential part in the selection procedure. On the basis of the experts’ assessment, they make a list of grant applications per action and per field ranked in quality order, which serves as a basis for the National Agency to take the grant award decision, following the proposal of the Evaluation Committee.
The Assessment
The European Commission establishes the standard quality assessment forms and uses them in all Programme Countries in order to ensure a coherent assessment of applications across Programme Countries.
Award Criteria
Each of the following award criteria comes from several elements which must be taken into account by experts when analysing an application. These elements form an exhaustive list of points to look at before giving a score for the given criterion.
The table below shows the ranges of scores for the individual quality standards depending on the maximum score that can be awarded to the relevant award criterion.
In order to pass the selection for funding under the Erasmus+ Programme, an application submission to a National Agency has to:
- score at least 60 points in total, and
- score at least half of the maximum points for each award criterion
General Principles of Erasmus Quality Assessment
The consolidated assessment is the final assessment of an application. It means that in case of applications for a grant, the consolidated assessment forms the basis for ranking the application on the list of eligible grant applications. While in
case of applications for accreditation, it determines if the applicant will receive the accreditation or not.
Proportionality: to ensure that the Erasmus+ Programme fully reaches its objectives, experts shall assess the qualitative level of the planned activities, goals, impact and results of the project in a proportional way, in relation to the size and profile of the applicant organisations.
Cost-efficiency: experts may judge that some of the units in an application form are not to be considered, even for projects deserving a high qualitative scoring. They may therefore propose a reduction of these units, which consequently will determine a reduction of the grant awarded by the NA.
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