I've been on both sides of a hackathon scoreboard — three first prizes, a top-3 finish, and one loss I still think about (STROT, judged on a two-minute pitch for a system that took two days to build). That combination is exactly why I judge pitches the way I do when I'm invited to sit on the other side of the table.
What I actually score
- Can I explain this system back to you in one sentence after your pitch? If not, the idea isn't the problem — the communication is.
- Does the demo work live? A slide of a screenshot is not a demo.
- Did the team make a real tradeoff on purpose? "We didn't have time for X so we did Y instead, because Z" tells me more than a feature list.
What I don't over-weight
Framework choice. I've seen React Flask judged harshly next to a flashier stack solving a weaker problem. The technology is a means, and judges who forget that end up rewarding the wrong thing.
If you want me on your panel
I judge student hackathons on-site or remote, and I bring this exact rubric — transparent, and shared with organisers ahead of time so nobody's scored on a hidden standard.
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.
