A judge who mentored one of the competing teams, taught several of its members, or knows the team socially has a real conflict of interest — even if they're confident they can score fairly.
How to handle it
- Disclose the connection to organisers before judging begins, not after a result is questioned.
- Recuse from scoring that specific team; let the rest of the panel cover it, or bring in an additional judge for that slot.
- If recusal isn't possible (a small panel, a small event), disclose to the other judges so they can weight your score for that team accordingly.
Organisers should ask this upfront
Include a simple conflict-of-interest question in the judge briefing form: 'do you know any competing team members personally or professionally?' It takes one line and prevents a much harder conversation later.
See what a judges' briefing should cover.
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.
