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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Running a judges-only debrief right after the event: the fifteen minutes organisers skip

#hackathonjudging #organisers #processimprovement

A short debrief among the judging panel, right after results are finalised, is one of the most useful and most frequently skipped parts of running a hackathon. Everyone's tired and ready to leave, which is exactly why it gets cut — and exactly why the insight is still fresh enough to matter.

What to actually cover in fifteen minutes

  • Where the rubric felt genuinely ambiguous during real scoring, not just in theory.
  • Any team or moment that tested the process in an unexpected way (a tie, a conflict of interest, a technical failure during a demo).
  • One thing that worked well enough to repeat next time, not only what to fix.

Why doing this immediately matters

Waiting a week to gather this feedback loses the specific, concrete detail that makes it useful — by then it's vague impressions instead of exact moments worth fixing.

See what a hackathon judge should include in a post-event report.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour in a suit and tie with a lanyard at a formal campus event
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 in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

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 2026-09-11.

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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