Required sections present and correctly named, page and character limits, font and margin rules, required sub-headings, and the attachments the solicitation demands. These are the return-without-review triggers, and they are mechanical enough to check reliably.
AGENCY COVERAGE
Which agencies the panel actually knows.
A mock panel is only useful if it judges you against the right rulebook. Where an agency publishes standard review guidance, the panel applies it alongside your specific call. Where none exists, your call is the rulebook.
Native — NSF's review behaviour is built in: PAPPG-aware compliance and the Intellectual Merit / Broader Impacts structure, plus your call's own criteriaFrom your solicitation — the panel extracts your call's stated review criteria, required sections, and format rules, and reviews against exactly those
AgencyMechanisms testedCriteria the panel appliesSource
NSFNational Science Foundation
Standard research grants, CAREER, MRI, and most Directorate solicitations
Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts in the PAPPG structure, plus the review criteria the solicitation adds on top of them
NativePAPPG + your solicitation
NIHNational Institutes of Health
R01, R21, R03, K-series, and the common F awards
The review criteria your FOA states — Significance, Innovation, Approach and the rest as your call defines them — scored on NIH's 1-9 impact scale
From your solicitationYour FOA's stated criteria
DOEDepartment of Energy · Office of Science
Open FOAs, Early Career Research Program, and BER/BES/ASCR programme calls
The merit criteria your FOA states, extracted from the call and reviewed against exactly those
From your solicitationYour FOA's stated criteria
DODDARPA, ONR, ARO, AFOSR, CDMRP
BAAs, White Papers, and CDMRP award mechanisms
Technical merit against the BAA's stated criteria, plus transition and relevance where your mechanism states them
From your solicitationYour BAA's stated criteria
NASAROSES and directorate calls
ROSES programme elements and Appendix-specific calls
The evaluation factors your ROSES element states, extracted and reviewed against exactly those
From your solicitationYour element's stated criteria
ERCEuropean Research Council
Starting, Consolidator, Advanced, and Synergy Grants
The criteria your call states — for ERC, ground-breaking nature, feasibility, and PI capacity as the call defines them
From your solicitationYour call's stated criteria
USDA NIFAAFRI and programme-specific RFAs
AFRI Foundational and Applied Science, and Education and Workforce programmes
The criteria your RFA states, extracted from the call and reviewed against exactly those
From your solicitationYour RFA's stated criteria
Private foundationsSloan, Simons, Moore, HHMI, Wellcome, and similar
Investigator awards and programme grants where the call publishes criteria
The foundation's published criteria where it states them; otherwise general merit, feasibility, and fit to mission
From your solicitationVaries by call
Anything elseAny solicitation you can upload
Institutional seed funding, state programmes, industry calls, internal competitions
The panel reads the solicitation you provide and derives its criteria from it, with no published standard to fall back on
From your solicitationFrom your upload
Working from your solicitation alone is not a weaker review. It means there is no published standard behind the call, so the panel holds you to what the call itself says and nothing more. The reviews themselves are unchanged.
DEFINITIONS
What “compliance checked” actually means.
Three different things get called compliance. GrantPanel does the first two and is explicit that it cannot do the third.
Whether the proposal answers the call it claims to answer: programme priorities addressed, eligibility conditions met on the face of the document, and required elements like data management or mentoring plans actually present and substantive.
Budget accuracy, cost sharing, subaward paperwork, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and the sponsor-facing certifications only your research office can sign. Nothing in a GrantPanel report substitutes for that review.
REQUESTS
Your agency is not on the list.
Run it anyway — upload the solicitation and the panel will work from it directly. Then tell us which agency it was. What we tune next is driven by what people actually submit.