UNIHACK Has A New Judging Process!
It is UNIHACK’s 5th year, and year on year we’ve seen consistent growth, with increases in mentors, volunteers and of course, you, the hackers!
Although UNIHACK 2017 was absolutely 🔥(in our opinion), this increase in participants carries with it, a set of new challenges.
Some issues we have identified with our current judging process have been:
- The amount of time it takes to get through all the teams during presentation day
- The time the judges take to deliberate and choose winners
- The wait time for participants was often too long, with participants needing to wait for 2+ hours between the judges walking around and announcing the winner
The current judging process involves the following steps:
- All teams set up their hack in a large expo-style event 📢
- The judges walk around to each table, and teams have 3 minutes to present their pitch, while judges take notes and ask questions ✍️
- We then lock the judges in a room together and help facilitate deciding on all the winners 🏆
- Competitors continue to pitch to the public until the judges are ready to announce the winners ⚾️
So far, this process has served us well, and seems simple in theory — but in practice, the judges have spent longer and longer deliberating each year, often leaving the participants to wait for hours. Judges also feel they don’t get enough time to understand all the hacks, leading to more discussion by the judges, and longer wait times for the participants.
With the objective of sustainable growth in mind (especially since they’ll be 200 participants competing this year 😱), we have decided to trial a new judging process this year!
We hope the new process will:
- Make the wait times for participants more entertaining 💃
- Let participants see the other hacks without worrying about leaving their booths 💻
- Because competitors don’t leave their booths, Category Judges will always get the team as a whole 🎖
- Streamline the judging process 🚀
- Give more information to the judges 📚
- Allow UNIHACK to scale smoothly into the future! 😎
Edit [17/07]: The new judging process will be rolling out in both Melbourne and Sydney.
Enter the new Judging Process!
The new process has the following changes:
1. New judge roles
There will be a judge specifically for each of the four criteria of UNIHACK: originality, technical difficulty, design and usefulness.
This is to cut down on judge deliberation time, and allow judges to focus on what they know best. In addition we have the Platinum Sponsor judge who will not have a specified criteria to keep things interesting. The other prizes on offer will have their own individual judges too — this means prizes such as Best Design and Most Creative will not be judged through this new process. The other prizes will have their own judges assigned to them, seperate from the Grand Prize Judges.
2. Rank and Filter
With this new ranking system, teams will still present in an expo style format to the judges. However, the main prize judges will only hear your 2-minute “elevator pitch” and will rank you on a scale of 1–5 in their respective criteria.
These scores will then be used to select the top 8 teams to move on to the next judging round.
It is our hope that this will make the judging quicker because the number of teams to discuss in detail will be significantly lowered by this filtering, saving us time. If you don’t make it into the top 8, don’t worry, you’ll still have a chance to win the Category prizes such as Most Creative Idea, Best Design, and the Meme Prize.
3. Present
Once the top 8 teams have been decided, they will be given 3 minutes to pitch their hack to the judges and the rest of the participants, with an additional 2 minutes to answer any final questions from the judges.
This gives participants more time to explain their idea, allows the rest of the participants to see the top hacks and the judges more information to decide the winners from. There will be mentors available for the top 8 to help tighten up their pitches and ensure they are putting their product in the best light possible. This stage is ultimately about expanding on your idea, and really emphasising how your project fits the 4 criteria.
4. Decide
Based on the presentations, the judges will then be locked in a room once again.
Judges will have a shorter amount of time to choose the top 3 winners. Once they have chosen it will be business as usual — with the top 3 prizes and Category prizes being presented at the closing ceremony.
