# Refuse People-Ranking Checklist

Use with [Refuse to Rank People With AI](/articles/refuse-to-rank-people-with-ai).

## The four-question check

Before asking AI to rank, score, or grade people, ask:

1. Would I be comfortable explaining the exact criteria to the person being ranked?
2. Is there an accountable human who owns this decision and can be questioned about it?
3. Am I using AI to organize evidence, or to produce the verdict itself?
4. Would this ranking hold up to an audit?

If any answer is no, stop and restructure: use AI to organize criteria and evidence, and make the
ranking or decision yourself.

## Context-specific checklists

**Hiring / candidate screening**

- [ ] Criteria were written down before any candidate was reviewed.
- [ ] AI was used only to organize documented evidence (resume facts, work samples), never to output a
      ranked shortlist.
- [ ] A named human owns and can defend the final decision.
- [ ] If using any automated scoring tool, it has been independently bias-audited (required by law in
      some jurisdictions for employment tools).

**Performance reviews**

- [ ] Criteria are consistent across everyone being reviewed, written before review season starts.
- [ ] AI checked my own written evaluations for consistent language and standards across people, not the
      other way around.
- [ ] The final rating is mine, based on evidence, not an AI-generated score.

**School grading**

- [ ] The rubric was set before any student's work was seen.
- [ ] AI assisted with organizing rubric criteria or flagging inconsistency, not assigning the grade.
- [ ] I can explain the grade to the student and parent without reference to an AI output.

**Everyday informal comparisons**

- [ ] I am not asking AI to tell me who is the "best" friend, partner, family member, or employee.
- [ ] If I am using AI to think through a relationship decision, I am using it to organize my own
      observations, not to generate a verdict about a person.

## What AI can still help with

- Drafting consistent, specific evaluation criteria before looking at any candidate or person.
- Organizing documented evidence into a clean comparison format for human review.
- Checking your own written evaluations for consistent language and standards across people.

## What this cannot do

An AI-generated score or ranking of a person is not neutral, verified, or safe to treat as a decision on
its own — informal use carries the same underlying bias risk as a formal system, without any audit
process to catch it.