ISSN 1453 – 7303 “HIDRAULICA” (No.

4/2019)
Magazine of Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Tribology, Ecology, Sensorics, Mechatronics

EDITORIAL

Who Evaluates the Evaluators?

It seems that the main element for the advancement of society

on the scale of technology and science has been, to a large
extent, the distribution of funds from national assets to the
specialists who managed to convince that their ideas are
valuable and will lead to high impact results. The criteria for
allocating funds were either discretionary, when a person or a Ph.D.Eng. Petrin DRUMEA
group have taken the right to select the ideas to be funded, or a MANAGING EDITOR

theoretically better solution was reached by which groups of expert evaluators were
established to decide what is good and what is not.
The solution of selection made by evaluators selected from among specialists is a correct
one, but it implies the existence of precise criteria and a base of specialists who have
proven their expertise in various technical and scientific issues. The hope that a
theoretician can make the right decisions in production development programmes, or a
machine tool specialist can decide what would be best for the aviation industry is illusive, if
not fully dangerous. Therefore, a first problem would be to find the right specialists for
each field.
A second major problem is to set clear criteria specific to the programme under discussion.
I do not think that it is useful for the number and type of articles to be the main criterion
neither in an industrial development programme nor when selecting evaluators in the same
idea.
Obviously, for the first problem things are complicated, I can even say with no solution in
the short term, because it is difficult to find the specialists able to make a correct
assessment and be willing to participate in such a difficult process. Maybe one should
work on the remuneration process and the involvement of professional associations to
help the programme coordinators in selecting the evaluators.
For the second problem, things are easier to solve because it is not so difficult for
evaluation criteria specific to each programme and not some general ones to be
established by specialists. In principle, one should give up the idea of the omniscient
specialist, who actually has little in common with the programme that he / she will have to
evaluate.
In the end, the natural question is who selects the evaluators, or, in most situations, who
evaluates the evaluators randomly introduced in the list of evaluators, regardless of the
type of programme? It would be extremely unpleasant to find that there is no such
assessment, or it is replaced by a selection procedure that regards only the tradition, or,
even worse, the relational system.
I wish all of you a better new year!
P. Drumea