Introducing Committee Review: Independent Multi-Expert Critique for Your Grant Proposal

You submit a proposal. You wait four to eight months. You get a rejection letter that says something like "the approach was not well-developed" or "the budget justification was insufficient." That is the entire feedback you receive in exchange for months of work.

Searching for AI research funding? Browse our AI Grants Hub for opportunities from NSF, NIH, DARPA, and more.

If you are lucky, you get a summary statement with reviewer scores and a few paragraphs of commentary. If you are applying to a foundation, you often get nothing at all -- just a polite email thanking you for your interest. Either way, you are left reverse-engineering what went wrong from fragments, hoping you can fix it before the next deadline. And the next deadline might be six months away.

This is the core problem with grant writing as it exists today: the feedback loop is brutally slow and almost always incomplete. Most applicants have no structured way to get multi-perspective critique before they submit. They ask a colleague to skim their draft. They hire a consultant for a few hours. They read it one more time themselves and hope for the best. None of these approximate what actually happens when a review panel evaluates your proposal.

How Real Review Panels Work

If you have ever served on an NIH study section, an NSF merit review panel, or a foundation review committee, you know the process is more rigorous than most applicants realize.

At NIH, a study section typically assigns three reviewers to each application. Each reviewer reads and scores the proposal independently before the meeting. They write detailed critiques covering significance, investigator qualifications, innovation, approach, and environment -- the five standard review criteria. Crucially, they do this work in isolation. Reviewer 2 does not see what Reviewer 1 wrote. This independence prevents anchoring bias -- the well-documented tendency for early opinions to disproportionately influence later judgments.

Then the panel meets. The three assigned reviewers present their scores and discuss the application. Other panel members can ask questions and weigh in. Disagreements are surfaced and debated. If Reviewer 1 gave the methodology high marks but Reviewer 3 flagged a fatal flaw in the power analysis, that disagreement gets aired. The discussion often changes scores. The final impact score reflects not just individual assessments but the consensus that emerges from structured deliberation.

NSF follows a similar pattern with merit review panels, and most large foundations use some variation of independent review followed by group discussion. The architecture is the same everywhere because it works: independence prevents groupthink, deliberation surfaces disagreements that individual reviewers might not catch, and consensus weighting ensures that the most broadly recognized problems rise to the top.

How Committee Review Mirrors This Process

Granted's Committee Review follows the same structural logic that makes real review panels effective. It is not a single AI giving you feedback -- it is six independent reviewers, a deliberation process, and a consensus output.

Dynamic reviewer construction. The six reviewers are not generic personas pulled from a template. They are constructed specifically for your grant based on the funder, domain, and evaluation criteria in your RFP. An NIH R01 in molecular biology gets a domain expert in the PI's subfield, a biostatistician focused on study design and power analysis, an NIH program officer evaluating alignment with institute priorities, an equity reviewer examining the DEI plan and health disparities framing, a budget analyst who knows NIH modular budget rules, and a skeptic looking for unstated assumptions and feasibility gaps. An NSF SBIR Phase I gets a completely different panel -- a commercialization reviewer assessing market size and IP strategy, a technical feasibility reviewer asking whether this can actually be built in 12 months, an NSF program director evaluating broader impacts.

The reviewer composition adapts to what the funder actually cares about. If the RFP weights commercialization at 30% of the score, the panel tilts toward reviewers who evaluate commercial viability. If the evaluation criteria emphasize community impact and organizational capacity, the panel reflects that.

Independent assessment. Each reviewer receives the full proposal, the RFP, the evaluation criteria, and their specific evaluation lens. They produce their critique in isolation -- concerns with severity ratings, strengths, and an overall assessment. No reviewer sees what any other reviewer wrote. This is the same independence guarantee that makes NIH study sections effective.

Deliberation and consensus. After all six reviewers complete their independent assessments, the system synthesizes a consensus. Concerns raised by multiple reviewers rank higher. High-severity items rank above medium and low. Each weakness in the final output includes which reviewers raised it, an actionable suggestion for how to fix it, and often a specific question that, if answered, would strengthen the proposal. The result is a stack-ranked list of every weakness in your proposal, ordered by how much it matters.

What Committee Review Actually Catches

Abstract descriptions of features are less useful than concrete examples. Here is what Committee Review findings look like in practice, drawn from real reviews of test proposals.

Budget justification gaps. "Year 2 budget of $180,000 for personnel represents a 40% increase from Year 1 ($128,000) with no justification for the increase. No vendor quotes are provided for the $45,000 in equipment purchases. The postdoctoral researcher salary of $62,000 is not benchmarked against NIH NRSA stipend levels." Raised by: Budget Analyst, Program Officer, Skeptic. Consensus severity: High.

This is the kind of finding that a single reviewer might note in passing but that becomes impossible to ignore when three of six reviewers independently flag it. Budget weaknesses are among the most common reasons proposals are scored down, and they are among the easiest to fix -- if someone tells you about them before you submit.

Missing partnership evidence. "Three partner organizations are named in the project narrative -- the County Health Department, a local university, and a community health center -- but no letters of support, memoranda of understanding, or evidence of existing relationships are included. The proposal claims 'strong existing partnerships' without documentation." Raised by: Program Officer, Community Impact Reviewer, Skeptic. Consensus severity: High.

Reviewers on real panels are trained to look for claims without evidence. If you say you have partners, they want to see the letters. Committee Review catches this because multiple independent reviewers are each evaluating the proposal against the standard of what a funder would actually require.

Weak evaluation plans. "The proposal states that the program will be evaluated annually but provides no measurable metrics, no baseline data, no comparison group, and no description of the evaluation methodology. The logic model on page 12 lists outcomes but does not connect them to data collection instruments or a timeline for measurement." Raised by: Domain Expert, Program Officer, Equity Reviewer, Skeptic. Consensus severity: High.

Four of six reviewers flagging the same weakness is a strong signal. In a real study section, this kind of consensus would likely tank the proposal's score regardless of how strong the science is. Committee Review surfaces it before the funder does.

Inconsistencies between sections. "The specific aims page describes a three-year study with four cohorts, but the research strategy discusses only two cohorts and the budget funds only two years of data collection. The timeline on page 8 does not match the milestones described in the project management section on page 14." Raised by: Technical Methodologist, Budget Analyst. Consensus severity: Medium.

Cross-section inconsistencies are notoriously difficult to catch in your own writing. You revised the aims page last Tuesday but forgot to update the budget. Two independent reviewers reading the full proposal with fresh eyes will catch it.

The Revision Loop

Identifying weaknesses is only half the value. The other half is doing something about them.

After reviewing the committee findings, you can respond to each one directly. For the budget gap, you might write: "We have three vendor quotes for the equipment purchases and will add them to the budget justification. The Year 2 increase reflects adding a postdoctoral researcher in Month 7 per the project timeline." For the missing letters of support: "Letters from all three partners are in hand and will be added as appendices." These responses do not need to be polished -- they are instructions that tell the revision system what you intend.

Then one click. Your proposal is revised to address every committee finding, incorporating your responses. This is not a blind rewrite that might introduce new problems -- it is a targeted, surgical revision where every change traces back to a specific weakness identified by the committee. Sections that the reviewers praised are left alone. The revision focuses its effort exactly where the committee said the proposal needs work.

Where Committee Review Fits in Your Workflow

Committee Review is not a replacement for human reviewers. A colleague who knows your field and has served on review panels will catch things that AI cannot -- institutional politics, the unstated preferences of a particular program officer, whether your preliminary data is actually as strong as you think it is.

What Committee Review does is give you structured, multi-perspective feedback in 15 minutes that would take weeks to assemble from colleagues. Most PIs and program directors cannot convene six expert readers on a week's notice. Even when they can, the feedback tends to arrive piecemeal -- an email from one colleague Tuesday, a marked-up PDF from another the following week, a phone call with a third who read the first half but ran out of time.

Committee Review gives you a complete, structured critique -- ranked by severity, backed by consensus, with specific suggestions for every weakness -- while your draft is still fresh and your deadline has not yet arrived. Use it to find the weaknesses before the funder does. Use it to focus your revision time on the issues that matter most. Use it before sending your draft to a human reviewer so their time is spent on the high-level strategic questions rather than catching the budget inconsistency on page 14.

Committee Review is available now on the Professional plan ($89/month, free to start). Each proposal can receive up to three committee reviews, so you can revise and re-review iteratively until the consensus shifts from "revise and resubmit" to "fund."

Try Committee Review on Your Next Proposal

Upload your RFP, draft your proposal with Granted's AI coaching, and submit it to the committee before you submit it to the funder. The weaknesses they find are the weaknesses your reviewers would have found -- except now you have time to fix them.

Get started free and try Committee Review

Keep Reading

• Can AI Write a Grant Proposal? What Works and What Doesn't
• Common Mistakes in NIH Proposals
• Best AI Grant Writing Tools in 2026
• See how Committee Review works

Ready to strengthen your next proposal? Granted AI analyzes your RFP, coaches you through the requirements, drafts every section, and now reviews it with an independent committee. Start free today -- no credit card required.