A rubric sets what to score. It doesn't guarantee a judge actually applies it consistently by the tenth pitch of a long day, when attention naturally drifts. A short personal checklist closes that gap.
What mine includes, run silently during every pitch
- Did the demo run on an input the team didn't rehearse? (execution)
- Can the team explain their own hardest technical decision? (understanding)
- Is there a specific person this solves a problem for? (impact)
- One thing genuinely worth praising, one thing worth improving — written down before moving to the next team.
Why writing it down matters more than having it in your head
A checklist you only intend to follow degrades by pitch six. One you physically check off, even briefly, stays consistent through pitch thirty — this is the entire value of a checklist over good intentions.
See five mistakes every first-time hackathon judge makes.
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.
