Criterion

From EvaluationWiki

The definitive level or property under study; in an evaluation it is the thing or one of the things that the program is trying to improve, e.g., the suicide rate in Allegan County. Criteria must be distinguished from indicators which are variables that correlate with the criterion variables and may be all we can directly measure. In the suicide case we can directly measure the criterion rate, but in studies of programs to reduce smoking, the criterion variable is lung cancer, which takes much longer to manifest itself than we can wait in evaluating the smoking reduction program's success, so we use 'reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked per day' as the indicator of success, a surrogate for the criterion.