Assessment of the proposed VAN method for predicting earthquakes in Greece remains inconclusive. Authors who have attempted to evaluate the method have had to make their own subjective decisions about some features of the hypothesis, and to propose their own algorithms for testing against a null hypothesis. Different treatments of the inhomogeneity in space and time have lead to widely different conclusions. The binomial distribution has been misused in considering whether predictions may have been satisfied ''by chance.'' Objective tests on the performance of the method, using independent data, cannot begin until the VAN hypothesis and the proposed null hypothesis have been fully formulated. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996