Glossary
Evaluation criteria
Evaluation criteria are the stated factors (technical approach, experience, key personnel, past performance, price, local participation) and their relative weights, published in the solicitation. The agency must evaluate against them and only them, and the relative order of importance has to be disclosed to bidders.
They are the specification for your proposal. Everything you write should be traceable to a criterion, and anything not traceable to one earns no points no matter how good it is.
The short version
- The criteria and weights are in the solicitation. If you have not extracted them into a table before writing, you are guessing.
- Agencies cannot evaluate on unstated criteria, and doing so is a standard protest ground.
- Pass or fail minimum qualifications are usually applied before scoring begins.
- Cost is frequently scored by formula, which makes the value of a price reduction computable in advance.
Why it matters to a bidder
Criteria determine both whether to bid and how to write:
- Use them as a bid or no-bid filter. If 40 percent of the score rests on experience with a system you have never deployed, the pursuit is a marketing exercise. Weigh that against what the bid will cost you.
- Mirror the structure. Organize your proposal in the criteria's order and use their exact headings. Evaluators score with a form; make their job mechanical.
- Compute the cost trade. Under the common lowest-price-divided-by-your-price formula, work out what each percentage of price is worth in points, then decide whether to buy points with margin.
- Answer subfactors explicitly. Criteria usually decompose into subfactors in the evaluation section. Those are the actual scoring lines.
Build this into your compliance matrix so writing assignments map to points.
A real example
A transit agency publishes criteria of 30 percent technical, 25 percent management plan, 25 percent price and 20 percent local workforce participation. A national firm submits a strong technical response and ignores the local workforce section beyond a sentence of intent. It scores 6 of 20 there and finishes second by 9 points. The winner, a smaller regional firm, had partnered with a local training program and documented it in two pages. The 20 percent nobody wanted to write decided the award.
How state and local differs from federal
Federal solicitations must state the significant evaluation factors and their relative importance, and disclose whether the non-cost factors combined are significantly more important than, approximately equal to, or significantly less important than cost. Numeric weights are often withheld.
State and local agencies more commonly publish exact point values (30 points here, 25 there), which is a genuine advantage to bidders because the arithmetic is knowable in advance. They also frequently include criteria with no federal equivalent: local vendor preference, in-state workforce, local business enterprise participation, and reciprocal preferences that adjust an out-of-state bidder's price by whatever preference that bidder's home state applies. Those factors are set by state statute or local ordinance, they vary between neighboring jurisdictions, and out-of-state firms routinely lose points they never noticed were available.
Common questions
Can an agency evaluate on something not in the solicitation?
No. Evaluating on unstated criteria is improper and is one of the more successful protest grounds.
Are the point values always published?
At the state and local level, usually yes. Federally, relative importance must be stated but exact weights often are not.
What is a local preference?
A statutory or ordinance-based advantage for bidders located in the jurisdiction, applied as bonus points or as a percentage adjustment to price.
How do I find out how I scored?
Request the scoresheets through a public records request or ask for a debrief. In most states the scoresheets are public after award.