I agree. There are many BNs who seem to become very interested in QAH a week before their evaluations with little to no prior QA, and then never touch it after. This is the 330-day nomination history of one BN whose first non-probation evaluation landed on February 14th.
Most people aren't as blatant as this, but it is completely valid to say that BNs have and will abuse QAH activity to pass an evaluation. To elaborate on why this is happening, I will perform a small exercise in arithmetic. This specific user actually joined last October and has 25 nominations, which conventionally would make them consistently under the minimum activity (approx. 2.27 nom/month), but since they spammed 16 QAH within 2 days one time in the past 11 months, their activity is raised to the equivalent of 29 nominations (approx. 2.63 nom/month). This is still under the minimum required activity, but throw in a couple of months of absence notices (which is reasonable) and anybody can stretch QAH abuse to cover for their lack of nominations (if you discount 2 months, the activity levels out to 3.22 nom/month, which is a passing activity).
As you can tell, QAH activity can be and is used to purposefully manipulate nomination activity without actually encouraging BNs to consistently contribute to QAH. This can be seen by this user not having done a single QAH before and having only done 2 QAH within the 6 months after the bulk of the work. A new incentive should be created to encourage consistent QAH activity that doesn't allow for such easy abuse. (I'd also like to encourage people to not attack the behavior, but the system that allows for it; lots of people would do the same thing in the same position)
Most people aren't as blatant as this, but it is completely valid to say that BNs have and will abuse QAH activity to pass an evaluation. To elaborate on why this is happening, I will perform a small exercise in arithmetic. This specific user actually joined last October and has 25 nominations, which conventionally would make them consistently under the minimum activity (approx. 2.27 nom/month), but since they spammed 16 QAH within 2 days one time in the past 11 months, their activity is raised to the equivalent of 29 nominations (approx. 2.63 nom/month). This is still under the minimum required activity, but throw in a couple of months of absence notices (which is reasonable) and anybody can stretch QAH abuse to cover for their lack of nominations (if you discount 2 months, the activity levels out to 3.22 nom/month, which is a passing activity).
As you can tell, QAH activity can be and is used to purposefully manipulate nomination activity without actually encouraging BNs to consistently contribute to QAH. This can be seen by this user not having done a single QAH before and having only done 2 QAH within the 6 months after the bulk of the work. A new incentive should be created to encourage consistent QAH activity that doesn't allow for such easy abuse. (I'd also like to encourage people to not attack the behavior, but the system that allows for it; lots of people would do the same thing in the same position)