How to use Erasmus+ quality assessment feedback to resubmit

Receiving a rejection from your National Agency is disappointing — but the quality assessment feedback report that accompanies it is one of the most valuable documents an Erasmus+ applicant can receive. It tells you exactly where your application fell short, how evaluators scored each criterion and — if you read it correctly — precisely what needs to change for the next submission to succeed.

Most organisations that reapply after a rejection do so without fully understanding what the feedback is telling them. They make surface-level changes, resubmit essentially the same application and receive essentially the same score. The organisations that succeed on resubmission treat the feedback report as a specification for the next version — they address every flagged weakness systematically, and they submit a different application, not a revised one.

This guide shows you how to do exactly that.

1. What Is the Erasmus+ Quality Assessment Feedback

The quality assessment feedback report is a structured document provided by your National Agency following the evaluation of your application. It is issued regardless of whether your application was approved or rejected, though it is most commonly sought and used by applicants whose projects were not funded.

The report contains two elements: a numerical score for each of the four evaluation criteria, and written comments from the evaluators explaining the reasoning behind each score. Both elements are essential — the scores tell you where you lost points, and the comments tell you why.

The four evaluation criteria and their maximum scores are consistent across KA210 and KA220:

2. How to Read Your Feedback Report

Reading a quality assessment feedback report requires discipline. The instinct of most applicants is to focus on the most critical comments — the parts that sting — and to rationalise or dismiss the rest. This is exactly the wrong approach.

Step 1 — Record every score. Write down your score for each of the four criteria alongside the maximum possible. Calculate the percentage you achieved on each criterion. A score of 18/30 on Relevance means you achieved 60% — significant room for improvement. A score of 16/20 on Impact means you achieved 80% — strong, but still improvable. This gives you an objective map of where your application was strongest and weakest before you read a single evaluator comment.

Step 2 — Separate scores from comments. Read the numerical scores first without reading the comments. This prevents the most common reading error: using a positive comment to explain away a low score. The score is the evaluator’s judgement. The comment is the explanation. Both matter, but the score is the ground truth.

Step 3 — Read each comment as a specification. For every evaluator comment that identifies a weakness, treat it as a specification for the rewritten section. Write it down as a task: “Rewrite target group definition with demographic data and geographic specificity.” The comment is not criticism — it is a brief from the evaluator telling you exactly what a passing version of that section needs to contain.

Step 4 — Note what evaluators said was strong. Positive comments identify the elements of your application that worked. These sections should be retained in the resubmission — not rewritten from scratch out of misplaced anxiety about the rejection. If the evaluator said your methodology was well-described, keep it and strengthen what surrounds it.

Step 5 — Check whether both evaluators agreed. If your feedback includes comments from two evaluators and their scores diverge significantly on any criterion, read both sets of comments carefully. Divergent scores suggest the section was unclear or ambiguous — not simply weak. The fix is to rewrite for clarity and specificity, not just to add more content.

3. Analysing Your Score by Criterion

Different score patterns require different reapplication strategies. The table below maps common score patterns to their most likely causes and the priority fixes for each.

4. How to Use the Feedback to Reapply

Once you have read and analysed your feedback, the reapplication process has four distinct phases. Each one is necessary — skipping any phase produces a weaker resubmission than the original application.

Phase 1 — Build a feedback response matrix. Create a simple table with three columns: evaluator comment, root cause of the weakness, and planned fix. Complete a row for every weakness identified in the feedback — not just the most critical ones. This matrix is your reapplication brief. Every section of the rewritten application should address at least one item in this matrix. When the matrix is complete, nothing in the resubmission should come as a surprise to an evaluator who has read the previous feedback.

Phase 2 — Decide whether to revise the project concept or the writing. This is the most important strategic decision in the reapplication process and is covered in detail in Section 5. Some applications fail because the writing was weak — the project idea was sound but poorly explained. Others fail because the project idea itself was not strong enough. These require fundamentally different responses.

Phase 3 — Rewrite section by section using the feedback as a guide. Work through each section of the application in order, using the feedback response matrix as your reference. For each section, ask: what did the evaluator flag here? What is the specific, concrete improvement that would address that flag? Write the improvement first in a separate document. If the revised version could have come from the same pen as the original, it is not different enough.

Phase 4 — Get an external review before resubmitting. The most reliable way to assess whether the rewritten application is stronger is to have it reviewed by someone who did not write it. An experienced Erasmus+ evaluator or proposal writer will read it with the same critical distance as the evaluator — and will identify weaknesses that the author, too close to the material, cannot see. This review should happen at least four weeks before the deadline.

5. Rewriting vs Revising: Which Does Your Application Need

Not all rejected applications need the same level of intervention. Understanding which type of improvement your application requires prevents the two most common reapplication errors: doing too little when a full rewrite is needed, and doing too much when targeted revision would suffice.

Your application needs targeted revision if your total score was above 55 points; evaluator comments were specific and actionable rather than structural; the project concept was described as relevant or interesting but inadequately developed; most weaknesses were in one or two sections; and the project idea, partnership and objectives are fundamentally sound. Targeted revision means rewriting the flagged sections from scratch while retaining the strong sections.

Your application needs a full concept rewrite if your total score was below 50 points; evaluator comments were structural — questioning the project idea itself rather than its description; weaknesses were spread equally across all four criteria; the target group was too broad; the European added value was not demonstrated; or the partnership was not genuinely complementary. A full concept rewrite means returning to the project idea stage and building the application around a stronger, more specific concept.

6. Most Common Reapplication Mistakes

Making cosmetic changes and resubmitting the same application. Adding a paragraph here, rephrasing a sentence there and resubmitting without addressing structural weaknesses produces a marginally different application that scores marginally differently — usually not enough to cross the funding threshold. Evaluators recognise a lightly revised resubmission and score it accordingly.

Addressing comments literally rather than substantively. An evaluator who says “the target group was not sufficiently defined” is not asking for a longer paragraph — they are asking for a more specific, evidence-based description of who the project serves, what barriers they face and why this project addresses those barriers. Adding length without adding specificity does not improve the score.

Ignoring positive feedback and rewriting strong sections. Some applicants, anxious after a rejection, rewrite every section including those the evaluators described positively. This often produces a weaker resubmission. Retain what scored well — focus your rewriting effort entirely on what scored poorly.

Reapplying without changing the partnership. If evaluators flagged the partnership as a weakness — partners too similar, complementarity not demonstrated, coordinator lacking capacity — reapplying with the same partners without addressing these issues will produce the same score on the Team criterion. Sometimes the reapplication requires finding a stronger or more complementary partner, not just describing the existing ones differently.

Not leaving enough time for a quality reapplication. Many organisations spend the first 8 months after rejection doing nothing and then rush a resubmission in the final 4 weeks before the deadline. A quality reapplication requires 3 to 4 months of preparation. Begin immediately after receiving the feedback — not when the next call opens.

Not getting an external review before submitting. The author of a rejected application is often the worst person to assess whether the rewritten version is genuinely stronger — they are too close to the material. An experienced external reviewer will catch weaknesses the author cannot see. This is not optional for a competitive reapplication — it is the single most reliable improvement available.

7. Reapplication Checklist

• ✅ Quality assessment feedback report requested and received from the National Agency
• ✅ Score recorded for each of the four criteria — percentage calculated per criterion
• ✅ Every evaluator comment read and logged — not just the most critical ones
• ✅ Feedback response matrix built — one row per weakness with root cause and planned fix
• ✅ Decision made: targeted revision or full concept rewrite — based on total score and comment type
• ✅ Strong sections identified from positive feedback — retained in the resubmission
• ✅ Weak sections rewritten from scratch — not edited line by line from the original
• ✅ Relevance: need documented with external evidence, target group defined with specifics
• ✅ Project Design: objectives rewritten as SMART, every activity has a named output
• ✅ Project Team: each partner justified specifically — not generically
• ✅ Impact: specific reach figures and named dissemination channels — no vague language
• ✅ Partnership reviewed — if team was flagged as weak, partner change considered
• ✅ Four consistency checks run: work plan vs objectives, budget, partner roles and timeline
• ✅ External review completed at least 4 weeks before the submission deadline
• ✅ Every item in the feedback response matrix addressed in the rewritten application