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A Few Comments by a Former TAC Member (1Mar93)
(from CTIO, NOAO Newsletter No. 33, 1 March 1993)

Over the past two years, it has been my privilege and one of my staff
responsibilities to serve as a member of the CTIO Telescope Allocation
Committee.  I have rotated off the TAC as of December 1992, due to
reassignments of observatory duties (Jay Elias will be a new member). I
want to take this opportunity to express a few personal (i.e., unpaid
and unsolicited) comments on the TAC process, and to offer a few words
of advice to proposal writers.

Let me initially state that the TAC process is considered a very
serious responsibility by the observatory, director, and the individual
TAC members. And I strongly believe it is the fairest scientific
evaluation process that I have participated in, or have knowledge of. I
think the TAC members perform superbly in a difficult and time
consuming process (which has very little in the way of rewards, except
for the semiannual trip to Tucson for a 9+ hour meeting; not everyone
considers this a benefit). I find that it takes me about two solid
weeks to simply read 200 proposals (4 hrs/day) and additional time to
research, rank, re-read, and assign preliminary grades. This is a very
heavy load (twice a year) for colleagues in university positions. I
think the individuals in the user community should be thankful and
grateful to the TAC members, especially since this responsibility could
fall on your shoulders in some future semester.

In my opinion, the major "problem" with the Telescope Allocation
process is the simple fact that we are oversubscribed by factors of
2-3+ on our largest telescopes, and the overwhelming majority of
proposals are worthy of some time (in my estimation, > 80%). When only
1/3 can be granted time, a lot of worthy projects cannot be supported
in any given semester. Most of the "problems," complaints, and concerns
of investigators who wonder why they didn't get time, are simply due to
these numbers. These statistics are not likely to improve, especially
if the observatory staff improves the performance of our telescopes,
detectors and instruments (e.g., 4-m improvements, ARCON and Loral
chips, CCD spectrographs for 1.5-m and 1-m), although the data quality
may increase significantly.

While some proposals are universally recommended for time, the majority
present projects which raise some questions, either of feasibility or
scientific context, in the TAC process.  The major evaluation criteria
are scientific merit and the need for southern observations. But the
nature of proposals is often trying something that hasn't been done
before, and therefore issues of technical feasibility are almost always
present. For this reason all proposals are sent for technical review to
2-3 staff members, who look at the details of the proposed
instrumentation, and the magnitudes and signal to noise requirements,
etc. The TAC requests these details and relies on this technical
review, but of course it can decide that projects that are considered
difficult technically still are worth the "risk" of assigning time. And
often the TAC has enough technical expertise for its own judgement on
these matters. The TAC members also have expressed the desire to
continue the use of outside referees, although as noted elsewhere in
this Newsletter, this practice is being discontinued.

Enough with the philosophy and accolades. I have four specific
recommendations, which I believe would improve the quality of many
proposals (and therefore make the TAC's job harder!).

1) Be as clear and concise as possible in writing the scientific
justification (part 4). Often we find contradictory or confusing
statements in the proposal (abstract vs. scientific justification vs.
specifics of program vs.  need for southern observations and access or
availability of other facilities). If the TAC has trouble understanding
what is being requested or studied, it will have trouble recommending
time.

2) Answer all the questions. Provide the technical information and some
target specifics in part 5, and comment on the southern hemisphere need
in part 6. This gives you more than the single page of scientific
justification to present your case. And please include details like
spectral resolution, wavelength coverage desired, etc., for
spectrographic proposals. You may not know the specific grating or
setup (we do upgrade our systems!), but we need these specifications to
evaluate the proper instrumentation and feasibility.  And give at least
some indication of the S/N desired. You should feel free to contact
staff members about technical details when preparing a proposal for
submission.

3) Include brief summaries of other recent allocations or results (no
preprints, though!). The TAC does consider their job to provide access
to a wide community of users, and if you have had 6 recent 4-m runs (or
that many on any telescope), we expect to see publications and results.
While it has not been fashionable in the last decade of economic
(ex-)success, some TAC members consider "sharing the wealth among
equals" to be a reasonable evaluation criterion.  Productive scientists
will continue to receive allocations.

4) Finally, you might consider sending in your proposal some time before
midnight on the deadline date. We might actually consider enforcing the
stated deadlines (e.g., five days earlier by e-mail).

Bob Schommer (free, at last, for now)

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