I feel your pain. At the FTU where I started my instructing career all the checkouts went to the new instructors. In retrospect that was pretty dumb as having to give the thumbs up or down on PPL's who almost always will fall in the gray area of "how bad is still good enough" can be the hardest job in instructing. The test I used was "at any time in the flight did I instinctively reposition my hands and feet so that I could take over". If the answer was yes , he/she did not pass. In avaition, somehow your gut will often cut through all the mental anguish and second quessing and give you a unequivical opinion.
However at the end of the day you do your best and have to live with the results. Again early in my career I was supposed to do a PPL checkout but was running late so the CFI did it for me. The next day the guy destroyed the aircraft with 4 heavy injuries from a low level stall spin after a botched go arond
BTW I
always Do a PFL on a checkout. In 17 years of full and part time instructing I have
never had a PPL do a acceptable PFL on the first try. Many of them were so bad they would have resulted in a probable fatal accident had the engine failure been for real
