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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Judging a solo hacker's submission fairly against team submissions

#hackathonjudging #solohackers #fairness

A solo participant produces less surface area — fewer features, a smaller demo — than a team of four with the same hours available, purely because there are fewer hands. Scoring them identically on raw scope isn't quite fair, but scoring generously just for being solo isn't fair to the teams either.

A workable approach

  • Keep the same rubric and weights for everyone — don't create a separate, softer bar for solo entrants.
  • Weight 'depth of execution on a smaller scope' as a legitimate strength within the existing execution criterion, rather than inventing a bonus category.
  • If solo participation is common at your event, consider a separate solo-hacker prize category instead of adjusting the main rubric.

What not to do

Silently mentally adjusting scores for solo participants without a stated rule creates exactly the inconsistency a rubric exists to prevent. If you're going to account for team size, make it an explicit, published rule.

See innovation vs execution: how I weigh a rubric.

About Pranjul Rathour

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Requirements gathering, on stage

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Pranjul Rathour

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Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer from Kanpur, in a white turtleneck and black jacket, looking to the side
Pranjul Rathour — GenAI engineer, Kanpur

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
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