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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Tie-breaking in hackathon judging: a process that doesn't feel arbitrary to the teams

#hackathonjudging #fairness #organisers

A tie at the top of the leaderboard, resolved by an organiser's gut call in the final ten minutes, is the single fastest way to make a hackathon's results feel arbitrary to every team that didn't win.

Decide the process before the event, not during it

  1. First tiebreaker: the highest-weighted rubric criterion alone (execution, in most rubrics) — whoever scored higher there wins the tie.
  2. Second tiebreaker: a live follow-up question to both teams, scored blind by the panel without discussion.
  3. If still tied, both teams share the placement rather than a coin flip deciding it.

Tell teams the process upfront

Publishing the tiebreak rule alongside the rubric, before the event starts, means nobody feels like the rule was invented to produce a particular winner. See a hackathon judging rubric organisers can copy.

About Pranjul Rathour

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 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 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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