Economy is always a concern—not just when money is tight. So, use of the internal evaluator to reduce costs is always a positive attribute. Given that, consider when use of an internal evaluator is likely to cause problems (e.g., conflict of interest or biases in addition to feasibility). I encourage you to use the Joint Committee’s evaluation standards both program and student evaluations as tools for guidance in this matter.

To mitigate travel costs quite possibly the internal evaluator can be used as the coordinator and “monitor” for local data gathering (e.g., student assessment situations) with collected data packaged and stored by a student or other staff member (if anonymity or confidentiality is a concern) for submission to the external evaluator. Such use could improve feasibility while retaining a higher degree of independence associated with the external evaluator.

Conflict of interest and bias issues can be mitigated through openness (explicitly recognizing the potential problem) and careful use of strategies to provide anonymous or confidential responses. My thought is that use of confidentiality is likely to be more productive when offered by external evaluators—people tend to trust persons to keep information confidential when the person receiving the information does not have a stake in the program.

It is likely that the PI rather than the evaluator will select and hire both the internal and external evaluators. Attention to the working relationship between evaluators (authority and responsibility matters) as part of the contract or attendant memoranda is likely to be crucial to establishing a positive and fruitful working relationship between the two persons or groups. For example, one small but crucial issue is whether correspondence between evaluators or between an evaluator and PI will be kept confidential (i.e., not shared with the PI when between evaluators or with other evaluator when between the evaluator and PI). Similarly, to what extent will data be shared and under what circumstances?

It seems to me that when both internal and external evaluators are used, the project must work carefully with staff and participants to ensure that all know the roles of the respective evaluators and what information is to be shared between evaluators and between them and the project administration.
We will do a quick follow up with several projects that use both internal and external evaluators to get their input and ask PIs who currently use both internal and external evaluators to give their suggestions for effective internal‐external evaluation practices.