For studies of Galactic evolution , the accurate characterization of stars in terms of their evolutionary stage and population membership is of fundamental importance .
A standard approach relies on extracting this information from stellar evolution models but requires the effective temperature , surface gravity , and metallicity of a star obtained by independent means .
In previous work , we determined accurate effective temperatures and non-LTE \log g and [ Fe/H ] ( NLTE-Opt ) for a large sample of metal-poor stars , -3 < [ Fe/H ] < -0.5 , selected from the RAVE survey .
As a continuation of that work , we derive here their masses , ages , and distances using a Bayesian scheme and GARSTEC stellar tracks .
For comparison , we also use stellar parameters determined from the widely-used 1D LTE excitation-ionization balance of Fe ( LTE-Fe ) .
We find that the latter leads to systematically underestimated stellar ages , by 10-30 % , but overestimated masses and distances .
Metal-poor giants suffer from the largest fractional distance biases of 70 \% .
Furthermore , we compare our results with those released by the RAVE collaboration for the stars in common ( DR3 , 48 ; 40 ) .
This reveals -400 to +400 K offsets in effective temperature , -0.5 to 1 dex offsets in surface gravity , and 10 to 70 \% in distances .
The systematic trends strongly resemble the correlation we find between the NLTE-Opt and LTE-Fe parameters , indicating that the RAVE DR3 data may be affected by the physical limitations of the 1D LTE synthetic spectra .
Our results bear on any study , where spectrophotometric distances underlie stellar kinematics .
In particular , they shed new light on the debated controversy about the Galactic halo origin raised by the SDSS/SEGUE observations .