Tag archive
A practical guide for student organisers and faculty coordinators: problem statements with users, judges and mentors worth inviting, a schedule with s
A complete, weighted rubric for student hackathons with scoring descriptors for each level, notes on calibrating judges, and how to publish criteria s
A short debrief among judges, right after results are decided, surfaces process improvements while they're still fresh — and is skipped far more often
A briefing on event day is necessary but not sufficient. What organisers can do beforehand to prepare judges who've never done this before.
Reliability and fit for the audience matter more to organisers than raw credentials. What actually moves an organiser from considering to booking.
How to invite a judge who will actually improve your hackathon: the brief, the rubric, the schedule, the number of teams, mentoring versus judging, an
Beyond the scores, a short report back to organisers on rubric gaps, standout teams and process friction helps the next event run better than this one
Judging quality drops sharply after a certain number of pitches in a day. A realistic per-judge cap and how to schedule around it.
A coin flip or an organiser's gut call at the top of the leaderboard erodes trust fast. A tie-breaking process decided before the event, not during it
A short calibration meeting before judging starts prevents most scoring inconsistency. What that fifteen minutes should actually contain.
A vague problem statement produces incomparable projects. Writing problem statements with the rubric already in mind fixes judging before it starts.
A single judge's taste becomes the whole competition's outcome. A panel with a shared rubric and a calibration round fixes that — here's how the two f