Morgan Stanley to Rate Employees with Adjectives, Not Numbers

>Evaluators will now be asked to list up to five adjectives that describe the employees. The aim is to give more direct feedback and better steer staff members toward areas of improvement.

While I think doing away with 1-5 is a good thing, this new system seems a little absurd to me. Are the managers so ineffective at communicating with employees that they cannot form a complete sentence to describe to each employee what they could do better?

There was similar news out of Goldman Sachs last week, which fueled a meaningful conversation on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781887