An organiser planning next year's hackathon rarely recalls a judge's exact scores from last year. What sticks is punctuality, the quality of written feedback, and whether the judge stayed calm and useful when the schedule slipped — which it always does.
What actually gets remembered
- Showing up on time, prepared, having read the problem statements in advance.
- Written feedback specific enough that a team quoted it back to the organiser afterward.
- Flexibility when a session runs long or a team's slot moves — judges who complain about schedule slips are remembered for that, not their scoring.
The compounding effect
Being the easy, reliable judge to work with, repeated across several events, is what eventually gets a judge recommended by one organiser to another — which is how most judging invitations actually happen.
See how to become a hackathon judge.
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
