Abstract: Subjective assessment tools for anal function play a crucial role in understanding anal function status and evaluating treatment efficacy, holding significant value for clinical decision-making and scientific research. This review systematically summarizes three types of subjective assessment tools applied in clinical studies over the past five years. Descriptive assessments focus on qualitatively documenting patient symptoms; severity assessments emphasize quantifying the frequency and intensity of symptoms, serving as the primary basis for current clinical functional evaluation and efficacy judgment; impact assessments focus on the interference of symptoms with patients' quality of life and psychological status. Building on this foundation, this review further narrows the focus to severity assessment tools, comparing the similarities and differences between grading scales and summary scales. It elaborates in detail on their distinctions in framework design and evaluation dimensions, and comprehensively reviews their current clinical application in colorectal and anal diseases. Through in-depth analysis, the main limitations of existing tools are identified: some scales exhibit poor cross-cultural adaptability, the lack of a unified "gold standard" leads to high heterogeneity across studies, and certain tools’s discriminative ability are limited in specific patient populations. This review aims to synthesize the current status and existing problems to provide a reference for optimizing the application strategies of subjective assessment tools and enhancing the standardization and comparability of clinical research, ultimately promoting the development of an evaluation system with greater cultural adaptability and clinical sensitivity.