For a project at the office I'm helping, yesterday I had to assign grades to some submissions. It's the third round of an iterative process and in my judgment this time everybody got extremely high marks. I speculated to the project leader why:

• I'm just back from vacation and must be in a good mood?
• The submitters learned a lot from previous rounds and are better than ever?
• My spirit has been broken after reading earlier, incredibly bad efforts, and I've given up hope and can no longer be critical?
• Reviewing submissions in rounds 1 and 2 educated me in the topic so much that I now understand and appreciate subtle arguments that went over my head before?

Or maybe all of the above!

^z - 2012-09-11