Documentation / QueryTek Review glossary / Standards Profile
A standards profile is the statement of what "good" means for a particular engagement — which standards, style rules, regulatory expectations, and organizational conventions the material must satisfy. It is the layer above the rubric, defining what is being assessed before deciding how to assess it.
Review only produces comparable results when the standard is fixed independently of the reviewer. A profile captures that standard so it can be applied, questioned, and revised as a unit.
A profile typically composes several sources.
External requirements. Regulatory language obligations, accessibility standards, or sector-specific rules that the organization does not choose and cannot vary.
Organizational conventions. House style, approved terminology, mandated disclaimers, tone expectations — the accumulated decisions that make an organization's material recognisably its own.
Engagement-specific direction. What this particular body of material must additionally satisfy, which is often where the client's real concern sits.
The profile is deliberately separate from the rubric. The profile says the material must be understandable by a non-specialist reader; the rubric says how a reviewer determines whether it is. Keeping them apart means a client can review and approve the standard without reading scoring mechanics, and the rubric can be refined without appearing to change the standard.
Precedence has to be explicit, because sources conflict. A regulatory requirement for specific phrasing may collide with a plain-language convention, and the profile is where that collision is resolved once rather than repeatedly by individual reviewers.
A profile attaches to the workspace, so every document in the engagement is assessed against the same standard. This is also what makes drift visible: if reviewers routinely note issues the profile does not cover, the profile is incomplete rather than the reviewers being inconsistent.
Most disputes about review quality are actually disputes about the standard. A client expecting regulatory precision and a reviewer optimising for readability can both do good work and still disagree about every document.
Writing the standard down converts that into a question the client can settle before the work starts, and gives every outcome something specific to cite.
QueryTek Review captures the applicable standard for an engagement as a profile attached to the client workspace, so reviewers apply a stated standard rather than an inferred one. Profile authoring is part of engagement setup.
