First-time judges make a predictable set of mistakes, mostly from applying instinct instead of the rubric they were handed.
The five
- Scoring on charisma: a confident presenter with a thin project outscores a nervous one with a strong build, unless you deliberately correct for it.
- Comparing teams to each other in the moment instead of scoring each against the rubric independently, which drifts as the day goes on.
- Letting the first team anchor the scale — team one gets a 9, and every later team gets judged relative to them instead of the criteria.
- Asking softball questions instead of the one question that tests whether the team actually understands their own project.
- Writing no notes, then trying to reconstruct feedback from memory at the end of a long day of pitches.
The fix for all five
Score immediately after each pitch, against the written rubric, with one sentence of notes — before the next team starts. It sounds small; it's the single habit that prevents most of this.
See how judges should give feedback.
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.
