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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Panel judging vs solo judging: why a hackathon needs more than one judge in the room

#hackathonjudging #paneljudge #organisers

A single judge's personal taste — a preference for slick UI over hard engineering, say — becomes the entire competition's outcome when there's only one scorer. A panel exists specifically to average that out.

What a panel needs to actually work

  • A shared rubric with weighted criteria, agreed before the first pitch, not improvised per team.
  • A calibration round: score one or two teams together as a panel and discuss the gap before scoring independently.
  • An odd number of judges per team where possible, so ties resolve without a forced tiebreaker rule.

When solo judging is actually fine

A small, low-stakes internal hackathon with a handful of teams can work with one judge if everyone agrees the exercise is more about feedback than ranking. The moment prizes or resume-worthy results are on the line, a panel is worth the extra coordination.

See what a judges' briefing should cover for how to run the calibration round in practice.

About Pranjul Rathour

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 presenting with a microphone in front of a slide reading 'Now what's the conclusion?'
Presenting to a room

Pranjul Rathour on stage presenting a requirements-gathering and user-flow slide
Requirements gathering, on stage

Pranjul Rathour seated in a black jacket and white turtleneck with an event lanyard
Pranjul Rathour

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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