>they did that for the first time earlier this year. they
>already said merit increases are scheduled for april so not
>sure why theyre pushing up evaluations.
>
>last year the boss said we all evaluated ourselves too high
>lol its been a slow year so not sure what im even going to put
>on there. he said not to score ourselves this time.

My gig is all about not giving people the highest scores available for each category so I feel you! They basically make it impossible to get the '10 of 10' score on anything, so you end up with a bunch of middle and upper middle scores even if you killed it during a year.

Evaluating others can be tough. Usually I find that too many people aren't even really trying to 'do them right'. Either it is a witch hunt of people with titles trying to screw people over during their review after NOT SAYING A DAMN THING ABOUT whatever the 'issue' magically is once review time rolls around. Or its a 'you had one issue one time so I'm gonna hang you over it even if it was 10 months ago'. OR on the other end, people are just trying to get it over with so you get told 'you aight..keep rolling' via a bunch of high enough to keep everyone out of trouble type scores.

The truth is usually somewhere in between but so many things have to go right in order to get to that truth during an evaluation session. This is ESPECIALLY true when people's money is tied to the eval/review. No one wants to admit to ANY failures in those situations!

Evaluating yourself, like you're mentioning, too often turns into a game that you play with the person who is reviewing you. If you're dealing with a jackass who hates to admit that you're doing a good or even great job, you damn near have to pretend that you aren't killing it in spots just to save yourself the grief of having to argue about how good you might be. If you're dealing with a softball reviewer, you're just going through the motions and you might get like no information on things that you may be able to improve upon. Messy!