Many competitions require that the skill of the entrant be evaluated either in part or wholly based on the assessment from a skilled judge. Using well respected or celebrity-based judges in the field that the competition is focused is also a great way to boost submissions. To setup judging you need to determine some key aspects.

 

Firstly who are going to be your judges and how and what submissions are going to be allocated to judges.

You may want multiple judges assessing the same entries or you may want to distribute submissions to separate individuals or groups of judges. You could even decide to distribute submissions of specific categories to judges who may be more specialised in that category of submission.

 

Secondly you need to determine how you want your entries to be assessed. Typically, there are two main methods.

 

Assessment rating: This includes either a single rating or multiple assessment criteria (e.g. a RUBRIC) ratings. The number of criteria you choose greatly depends on the depth of assessment you want to conduct per submission. This may be influenced also by the volume of submissions each judge needs to assess. Rating based assessments are normally conducted earlier in the judging process particularly if there are multiple rounds of judging.

 

Ranking: This involves judges making a comparison assessment between multiple submissions that have been presented to each judge and allowing them to rank the submissions from favourite to least favourite.

This type of assessment is more commonly used for later rounds when the number of submissions progressed from previous rounds have been reduced to a more manageable number of submissions. This allows judges to compare submissions more easily between each other.

 

Once your rounds have been scored by all judges the scores should be tallied for each submission and then ordered to determine winners or submissions that will progress to the next round.