Evaluating someone is by, necessity, a structured process, as consistency is vital – candidates must be subject to the same criteria and rating systems. ⚖️ Besides, having templates to work with sets clear rules and expectations to evaluators. On that account, everything starts by having templates that are ready to use.

To access your school's library of evaluation templates:
​ 1) Click the gear on the top right-hand corner and then General settings
​ 2) Enter the tab Institution
​ 3) Go to Evaluation templates

The overview is composed of three columns: the NAME and TYPE of the template, and how many EVALUATIONS have hitherto been made from it. The functions are equally straight-forward, but we'll break them down anyway. 😘

1) Click Create a new template
​ 2) Define a NAME
3) Press Create template and add more info

The content of an evaluation template is split into two tabs: Details, where you can tweak the Name and determine what Type a given template is, namely an individual evaluation or a team evaluation; and Schema, where you design the input fields to appear in the form. We'll expand on Type in a bit, but to learn all about creating a form, read our article How schema fields work.

TIP: We strongly recommend creating a field to write in the name of the evaluator, interviewer or assignee, because later this can be used in the evaluation, application or class overviews to create a saved view featuring the rule "Name of evaluator ⇢ is equal to ⇢ [choose value/s]". This way, evaluators can easily filter the evaluations specifically assigned to them.

In the tab Evaluation templates:
​ 1) Click the button Duplicate template

2) Choose the existing template that you want to DUPLICATE FROM
​ 3) Press Duplicate template

In the tab Evaluation templates, tap the gear icon on any given row to enter the respective template and update it; or press X and then I understand the consequences, delete this template to say bye-bye forever. 👋

As alluded before, evaluations can be one of two types: individual or team-shared. An individual evaluation can only ever be edited by its author (i.e., the person who started the evaluation, not the person who originally created the template). 💁🏾‍♂️ On the opposite spectrum, a team evaluation allows for multiple staff users to edit the evaluation. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 There are no absolute rights and wrongs here, only what's best and most appropriate for a specific template in relation to its intended usage and due requirements. Obviously, an individual evaluation is "safer" in a way – only editable by the relevant party –, and you know exactly whom to credit. But team evaluations open the door for collaboration, in that different people can fill out different sections, or pick up where a colleague left off (the drawback being that you can't know for sure who filled what). In any case, you can change a template's type whenever you want, with the caveat that this only applies to newly started evaluations, and will not impact evaluations that are already finished or in progress.

TIP: An efficient way of managing team templates is to divide the fields into separate and distinct sections for different staff members to work on. 💡👍

To tighten security around evaluations and make sure only staff users with authorised roles can handle the sensitive information within, be it to view, add, delete or make changes to data, you can effectively restrict permissions by team. 🔐 That's done in the Schema tab, under Who can edit this field? and Who can see this field?, which you can read about here. Do note that it's not possible to hide and restrict information from specific staff users, which is why staff roles are so important to correctly designate.

Once created, an evaluation template doesn't magically attach itself to an application template, so it's your duty to link them together. 🧙‍♂️✨ You can do so by going inside an application template, enabling the Evaluations tab, and then picking which evaluation templates you want to make available for it, which is a security measure to prevent evaluators from using inadequate templates by mistake. This is the short version. For the longer version:

1) For institution-level application templates: in General settings > Institution, go to Application templates and enter a template of your choice; for class-level application templates: go to Programmes & Classes instead, open an intake, proceed to Application templates and open the application template there
​ 2) Jump to the tab Evaluations
​ 3) On the tab Details, opt for one of three settings:

We won't go through each function, because they're accompanied by a detailed description, as shown in the screenshot above. However, if you tick specific evaluation templates, next you'll have to tap the box underneath to select evaluation templates – this will expand a dropdown list to choose from.

Repeat this action to add more templates, or hit [Backspace] on your keyboard to remove one by one, beginning from the bottom.

If you don't know, mapping schema fields is the process of associating a field from a schema with a field in another schema, to automatically pass data to and from either. The objective is to to dramatically save time and boost productivity by auto-populating the empty fields of newly started evaluations. 🌟🙌🌟

The gist of the setup is simple: go inside an application template, enter the tab Mapping and start connecting the fields. Mapping is only feasible after you've linked an evaluation template to at least one application template, and the schema field types must necessarily match for it to work. For more detail on this operation, come here.