See how to set up blind scholarship review in Reviewr, from the application form to the final score.
What a reviewer can see changes how they score. In a field experiment published in 2025, a University of Chicago researcher had 245 reviewers score 657 academic conference submissions, some with author names showing and some without. Hiding the names closed the gap between students and senior applicants and narrowed it for applicants from less prestigious institutions, and the blind scores predicted later success just as well.
Scholarship committees know this, which is why so many try to review blind. In practice, a staff member goes through every application by hand before review, blacking out names, schools, hometowns and anything else that identifies the student. It takes hours or days in the middle of the deadline crunch, and it still misses things: a school mascot in an essay, a reference letter on school letterhead, a last name the committee recognizes.
This session is built around two of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible.
The first is Reviewer Calibration: are reviewers trained, are conflicts enforced, and are their scores checked against each other? Blind review is part of it. Can your reviewers score an application without knowing whose it is?
The second is Rubric Clarity: are criteria written, weighted and visible before anyone applies? When students are judged against criteria set in advance, a familiar name or school has less room to move the score.
When blind review depends on hand redaction, it's only as blind as the last page someone checked. The staff time is the cost you see. The larger cost is a committee that can't fully show its decisions were based on the application. When a parent, donor or board member asks why one student won, "we tried to redact everything" is hard to defend, especially in a community where people know each other.
Whether a program can review blind is decided when the application is built: where it collects names and schools, and what it asks students to leave out of essays and uploads. Once applications start arriving, the only option left is the marker. The time to set it up is before the window opens.
Scholarship program administrators at foundations, nonprofits, associations, credit unions, companies and education foundations, plus the committee chairs and reviewers who score applications.
Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the recording.
Does Reviewr black out names inside essays and uploaded documents? No. Reviewr hides form fields from reviewers, such as name, school and hometown. It doesn't remove text inside uploaded documents. That's why the session focuses on building the application so identifying details are collected in fields, and on instructions that tell students what to leave out of their essays and uploads.
Is Reviewr secure enough for student data? Reviewr is SOC 2 Type II certified and supports single sign-on. Your organization owns its data and can export it.
We only run a few scholarships. Is this for us? Yes. Blind review matters most in smaller communities, where committee members are most likely to recognize an applicant. The same setup works for one scholarship or many.
Founded in 2011, Reviewr has processed more than 1 million applications for thousands of organizations.
The all-in-one platform for managing scholarships, grants and awards programs.
