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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Designing hackathon problem statements that judges can actually score fairly

#hackathonjudging #organisers #problemstatements

A hackathon that hands out a vague theme ('build something for education') gets back thirty completely incomparable projects, and no rubric can fairly rank an app against a hardware demo against a research notebook.

Write problem statements with judging already in mind

  • Name a real user and a real constraint: 'help a first-generation college student pick electives' scores more consistently than 'improve education'.
  • State what a working submission must be able to do, at minimum, so 'execution' has something concrete to check against.
  • Keep problem statements narrow enough that teams choosing the same one produce genuinely comparable projects.

The organiser's real job here

A good problem statement does half of a judge's calibration work before the event even starts, because it constrains what 'good' can look like. Spend the time here; it pays off in every judging round that follows.

See how to run a college hackathon: an organiser's guide.

About Pranjul Rathour

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In a packed college auditorium

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At a formal campus event

Portrait of Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, wearing wire-frame glasses
Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour presenting on stage in a blue polo, with his Annapurna demo video on the screen behind him
Presenting Annapurna on stage

Pranjul Rathour giving a talk titled 'How and what I do', with demo videos of his products Vaidya and Annapurna on screen
Talking through the products he has shipped

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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