They are dreaded, awkward, often biased, and described as a necessary evil. Indeed, many companies, such as Adobe, Deloitte, and GAP have stopped giving performance reviews. Is it working? According to a new study by CEB (now Gartner) maybe not. The study posits that performance went down in companies not using performance reviews. Brian Kropp with CEB suggests that there are not too many managers who can provide good reviews without some type of rating system. With apologies to cognitive psychologists out there, perhaps this is a cognitive function. In other words, from the managers point of view, how are we to rate someone at any level without something to rate them by? Then from the employee’s point of view, how do I really know where I stand without a scale to measure myself against? Except for the Picasso’s in the world, the human mind probably doesn’t think as well in the abstract. A good question to ask is, “Have the ratings really disappeared?”