Slide of the day. NIH reviewer give overall impact and individual scores for each of the 5 review criteria. The Approach criterion score most corresponds with Overall Impact score.
Slide is a section of the Handbook 1/4

This is the PLoS article comparing individual criterion scores to overall impact score, although @jeremymberg first published an analysis early on in the switch to individual scoring (link next tweet). 2/4 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0155060

I've been thinking about this since it was published 10 years ago. Why is this true? Finally distilled it into the bullets in the slide of the day. If the reviewers think the idea/problem is important, the next hurdle is how you propose to do it. 3/4
https://loop.nigms.nih.gov/2010/07/even-more-on-criterion-scores-full-regression-and-principal-component-analyses/

Although NIH has the granular data, my experience is that if they like the idea, the clarity of the research plan drives reviewer scores. For some agencies and grant mechanisms (NEH to USDA) , I've seen "clarity" of the description of the work as an explicit review criterion. 4/4