Occasionally a team disagrees, sometimes loudly, with a score — usually right after results are announced, when disappointment is freshest. How a judge responds in that moment matters for the team, the organiser, and the event's reputation.
How to handle it
- Listen fully before responding — most of what a team needs in that moment is to be heard, not immediately corrected.
- Point to the specific rubric criterion and what was and wasn't demonstrated, rather than a vague 'we felt it was weaker'.
- If the team makes a fair point that genuinely wasn't considered, say so honestly — but don't change a published score after the fact just to placate frustration.
What not to do
Getting defensive or dismissive in the moment turns a disappointed team into one that feels wronged, which is worse for the event than the original disagreement. Calm, specific, rubric-anchored answers de-escalate almost every case.
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.
