DEV Community

Cover image for Judging alongside non-technical co-judges: making a mixed panel actually work
PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Judging alongside non-technical co-judges: making a mixed panel actually work

#hackathonjudging #mixedpanels #collaboration

A panel mixing a technical judge with a business, design or domain-expert judge naturally scores execution differently — a technical judge spots a fragile demo instantly; a non-technical judge may not, and vice versa for market fit or usability.

Making a mixed panel work

  • Assign rubric criteria roughly to expertise during calibration — the technical judge weighs in more heavily on execution, the design judge on usability, both discuss impact together.
  • During calibration, have each judge explain what they're actually looking for in their area, so the others can spot it too.
  • Resist the urge to have the most confident voice dominate every criterion — the point of a mixed panel is the different lenses, not one lens amplified.

Why mixed panels are worth the coordination cost

A purely technical panel over-rewards clever engineering with no real user; a purely business panel under-rewards genuine technical difficulty. Together, properly calibrated, they score closer to what actually matters.

See panel judging vs solo judging.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour speaking from the podium at VSICS, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

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

Top comments (0)