How organisers should train first-time judges before the event, not during it

A briefing on event day is necessary but not sufficient. What organisers can do beforehand to prepare judges who've never done this before.

Written by

Pranjul Rathour

GenAI Engineer at SCULT INDIA, based in Kanpur, India. Builds production RAG systems, fine-tunes open LLMs and ships agentic AI products; has mentored 200+ college developers. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks.

pranjulrathour41@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub X Instagram Bluesky Dev.to

Requirements gathering, on stage

A same-day briefing calibrates a panel on the rubric, but a first-time judge benefits from preparation before event day too — organisers who invest in this get more consistent scoring from their newer judges.

What organisers can send in advance

The rubric itself, a week ahead, with a short explanation of what each criterion actually means in practice.
Sample past submissions with example scores and reasoning, so a new judge can calibrate their own instincts against a reference.
A pairing with an experienced judge for their first event, so questions can be asked in the moment rather than guessed at.

Why this investment pays off

A judge who arrives having only seen the rubric that morning inevitably improvises more than one who's had a week to internalise it — and that improvisation is exactly where inconsistency between judges creeps in.

See what a judges' briefing should cover.

— Pranjul Rathour, GenAI Engineer from Kanpur, India. Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at any campus: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.