Less than a year after announcing the rollout of a new online platform for evaluations, the Air Force is pausing use of the system amid a deluge of complaints from Airmen.
The service initially promised that the platform, dubbed myEval, would be a “21st century IT application” and eventually include functions such as “click to sign” for forms, the auto-population of information directly from the Military Personnel Data System, and “integration with other myFSS applications, such as myFitness, to auto-populate performance-related data.”
Such features, however, were not available upon launch in February, and complaints quickly began emerging on Reddit, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
On Nov. 19, the Air Force Personnel Center seemingly yielded to those complaints, announcing that it would “pause using the current version of myEval to create and process all enlisted and officer evaluations.” Instead, Airmen will use PDFs from e-Pubs to complete evaluations, processed through the Case Management System.
“This pause also allows our A1, AFPC, and Digital Transformation Activity teams to focus on the future myEval so it provides the trust, reliability, transparency, and simplicity we need moving forward,” AFPC said in a Facebook post.
The agency gave no timeline for when myEval might be relaunched or used again, and the Air Force did not respond to a Nov. 22 query from Air & Space Forces Magazine.
The move to shelve the system ends a tumultuous 11 months since the Air Force first rolled out myEval. The Air Force did not immediately detail how many complaints it received from Airmen about the application, or any other data about the feedback it received, but the overwhelming consensus was that it was confusing, buggy, and frequently failed.
Among the issues Airmen have publicly noted, many said it often took multiple attempts to perform a single step before forms or changes were recorded; data that was pulled was incorrect and hard to change; character limits and spacing created appearance issues on performance reviews; and other problems.
Issues with the system were so prolific and widespread that Vice Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin and Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass acknowledged the problem in a Sept. 1 “Coffee Talk” livestream on Facebook.
“I think everyone would say it’s not as well executed as it could be,” Allvin said at the time. “We own that.”
Bass once more acknowledged the problems in a Nov. 21 post confirming that myEval has been paused.
“We get it, folks. We have seen the memes and the jokes … more importantly, we have seen the legitimate concerns and feedback about myEval,” Bass wrote. “As it stands now, the system is not able to seamlessly process reports into a member’s official records.”
Bass even poked fun at the system herself, posting a meme from the 2014 film “The Babadook,” with a mother asking her child, “Why can’t you be normal?” and the child being labeled “myEval.”
Airmen across the service posted plenty of memes and jokes about myEval over the last several months, but there was also concern that the system’s problems would have very real effects on service members’ careers—potentially costing promotions, assignments, or awards—to say nothing of the day-to-day headaches and stress that dealing with the system caused.
Yet while many Airmen have clamored for myEval to be shelved for months now, the shift to PDFs and the Case Management System could potentially create new headaches, as some Airmen posted on social media that they had labored through myEval to finish evaluations, only to now have to restart the process.