How to avoid arbitrary scores in subjective criteria?

Public tender, what a complicated but crucial issue. In theory, it should be the cleanest path for the State to hire services or buy things, but reality is another story. Transparency, justice, objectivity ... They sound good, right? But if you see yourself, the big problem is that sometimes the evaluation criteria are written as if they were riddles, leaving the door open to scores that seem taken from a magician hat.

First of all, you have to put aside those ambiguous criteria. If you are going to put requirements, put them clear, almost with pears and apples. Nothing of "the supplier must be adequate" —Aduced according to whom? Better specify: "The supplier must have minimum three years of experience in similar projects." This nobody becomes alive playing at will.

Another thing that helps a lot: the famous tables and punctuation templates. I know, it sounds bored, but believe me, the revolutions to the creativity of the evaluators lower. If you have a definite scale, type from 1 to 5, with examples of what each score means, there is less chance that someone gets a ten just because the jury liked.

And no one is saved here without training. Putting anyone evaluated is a recipe for disaster. You have to train people, explain the system well and, above all, make it clear that this is not a Eurovision where you can vote for your neighbor just because yes.

Transparency should be sacred. If a company is out or receives a low, minimal note that explains why. And if they do not agree, then have a chance to claim. Nothing "is decided based on internal criteria" and crying at the crying. The more open the process is, the less space there is for triquiñuelas.

And, if you want to go to proof of everything, put an independent third to review. An external auditor, someone who does not have candles in the burial, who throws an eye and say if everything is in order or if it smells weird.

In short, avoiding these rare scores is more than a desire: it is a matter of putting clear rules, using tools that do not give rise to excessive creativity, train evaluators well, be transparent to the core and have someone by monitoring the process from the outside. It sounds a lot, but it is the only way for the tender to be really fair. And yes, there is still a path, but with these steps at least they don't grab you out of base.