Judging typically begins once submissions are made on Devfolio.
Judges can be representatives sent by sponsors or industry resource personnel invited to attend the hackathon. Make sure to inform them well in advance so that they can spare time to make it to your hackathon.
The judging process should be straightforward and do justice to the hackers’ efforts over the long hours spent building their hacks. It should be free from the undue influence of the organizers and avoid any bias in the interest of fairness. Since outstations hackers would have planned to leave shortly after the hackathon, the judging process should not take more time than necessary. Described below is a process that we’ve used ourselves and has been tested across the Devfolio hackathons.
The organizer should call a meeting of all invited judges at least half an hour before the judging is scheduled to begin. During the meeting, the process should be clearly described to all the judges. The number of judges should ideally be proportional to the number of teams at the hackathon. Judging groups let the hackers get a holistic review of their hack. Judges can be paired with each other based on their strengths to form judging groups. For example, pair an engineer with a designer, product manager with a full stack developer, and so on. After submitting the projects on Devfolio before the submission deadline, the teams will set up the demo on their tables. Each team will be assigned a judging group, and the judges will visit their table.
The team can use up to 5 minutes to describe their hack. They will have the opportunity to talk about what they built, why they built it, and demo how their project works. The team may talk about their project with a powerpoint presentation, but they still have to demo what was built.
The judges will be rating each team on Technicality, Originality, Practicality, Aesthetics, and overall Wow Factor of the project. The judging groups will then be picking the best projects from the cohort they reviewed, giving a set of top teams as required. The judges can be provided a dedicated room with access to the
The top teams will be invited on stage during the closing ceremony, where they will again get 5 minutes to present their project on stage to all attendees and the judges. The judges can then independently judge all the hacks to come with the prize winners.
Devfolio Advantage: Judges can use the submission links to review the hacks on the public submissions page to refresh their memory during the normalization process.
Sample Calculation:
No. of Teams: 50
No. of Judges: 10
No. of Judges per Group: 2
No. of Judge groups: 10/2 = 5
No. of Hacks judged per Judge Group: 50/5 = 10
Time per hack demo: 5 Mins
Time taken for first round of presentation and judging: 5*10 = 50 mins + 10 mins (overshoot allowance)
No. of Teams called for second round judging per Judge Group: 2
No. of on-stage demos: 2*5 = 10
Time taken for second round of presentations and judging: 5 * 10 = 50 mins + 10 mins (overshoot allowance)
Total time reserved allowing for delays = (2 + 0.5) = 2.5 hours