NIH F30 Study section question

[gstrub]

I have a question regarding how cutoff scores for the NIH F30 grant. Does the institute set the cutoff score for each round before the study sections meet, or does each individual study section set its own cutoff score? The reason I ask is that in another thread (NRSA F30 Applicant Pool) a member said that his score was not funded, but his PO had indicated that a 180 was the cutoff score. I just received a 153 score, same institute (NINDS), same deadline, but different group of study section members and program official. Will this 180 score be applied to all study sections? Should I start celebrating?
Thanks,
Graham

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[Neuronix]

I still don't understand why you haven't just e-mailed or called your program official and asked him/her.

 

[gstrub]

He told me they have to wait until all the scores are in until they decide a cutoff. Looks like I'm waiting some more...

 

[Neuronix]

If that's the case we weren't on the same deadline. I may have just received my decision, but it was ~2 months late and I only got it because I e-mailed the program official. I still have received no notice about the final status and eRA commons still says pending.

 

[strangeglove]

The priority score is an indication of the quality of your proposal. Whether or not it gets funded (i.e. whether the "cutoff" is 180 or 130) will depend how many people are applying for money from the same source, which is reflected in your percentile rank. Whether that percentile rank gets funded will depend upon how much money has been allocated for that source, which, in turn, will depend upon the budget that congress passes that year. When I received my priority score, I was told that I would have to wait until congress passed that year's budget before they would make a decision (this happened to be a year that there was a major budget deadlock). Though my score was at the upper limit of the fundable range for the year before, I was told by my PO to re-write the application as if I had been rejected, just in case. By the time I did this and was ready to re-submit, the budget came through and I got the NRSA. Thus, my re-write was for naught. Actually, it was a good learning experience, because this is something that all of us will have to learn how to do. So, the "cutoff" is not established before your grant is submitted and sometimes it is not even established after you receive your priority score.

 

[Neuronix]

which is reflected in your percentile rank.

One of the big things that confuses NINDS applicants is that they do not give percentiles for F series grants, only priority scores.

 

[gstrub]

There should be a resource somewhere that says what the cutoff was for each institute at different deadlines. e.g. my first submission (NINDS, April 5th deadline) was not funded and the PO said the cutoff was 150. I searched everywhere for this info but I don't think it exists.

 

[gringotuno]

There isn't any real need to post the past cutoffs because the cutoffs change significantly from year to year becasue of fluctuations in 1) the amount of money they have in each cycle to spend on F30s and 2) the number of F30s they receive/review in each cycle.

On a tight budget cycle, they may only be to fund 1 application. And, if the highest priority score in that cycle was a 120, then the cutoff will be a 120.

Similarly, on a loose budget cycle, they may be able to fund 5 applications. And, if they got a group of crappy applications with the top 5 scores being 150, 170, 190, 200, and 220, the cutoff score would then be 220.

I applied to the NIEHS and went into CRISP to see how many F30s the NIEHS has funded over the past few years. I then tallied up the number of new F30 awards the inst awarded for each of the past 4 years. There was significant variation. It was something like this:

2001: 13 F30s awarded.
2002: 8 awarded.
2003: 1 awarded.
2004: 6 awarded.

Again, this isn't for cycles but ENTIRE years... and in 2003, only 1 new F30 was funded over the whole year.