This article explains how judges participate in award deliberations: what to bring, how to talk about teams, and how award winners are selected. It is written for judges.
Definitions of the terms used here are maintained in the central glossary.
Judge Advisors facilitate the deliberation process; that role is covered in Facilitating Judging Deliberations (coming soon).
Deliberations are the final step in the judging process. Judges bring together what they heard in interviews and read in summaries and Engineering Notebooks, compare teams against the published award criteria, and decide the Judged Award winners together. All deliberations, notes, and discussions are confidential.
What You Bring to Deliberations
Judges work in pairs or small groups, interviewing teams and reviewing Engineering Notebooks throughout the event. As your group works, keep track of your strongest teams for each award. By the time deliberations begin, your group should be able to easily name its top teams and why.
Come to deliberations with those ideas, your rubrics, and your notes. Rubrics are tools that support deliberations: final decisions combine quantitative evidence — rubric scores and rankings — with the qualitative evidence in your notes, observations, and conversations with teams. No single number decides an award. What matters most is the relative comparison your rankings capture, and the specifics behind them: what a team said, showed, or documented.
Nominating Award Candidates
Each judge group identifies its top candidates for each award from the teams it interviewed and creates a shortlist. Not every group needs to nominate a team for every award.
How Teams Are Compared
- Teams are evaluated against the published award criteria in Award Descriptions — never against each other's resources, experience, or polish.
- Performance data supports award decisions; it does not determine them. When an award includes performance criteria, use final Qualification and Skills rankings. Elimination and Finals match results are not considered for Judged Awards.
- The Judge Advisor provides the event data deliberations need, including rankings and award eligibility reports.
If judges need more information about a team during deliberations, the Judge Advisor coordinates how it is gathered. Teams are never told which awards they are being considered for.
Talking About Teams
Deliberation is a conversation, not a debate to be won. These practices keep the discussion fair and grounded in evidence:
- Anchor every point to an award's criteria. The strongest statement in a deliberation names the criterion and the evidence for it. If a point can't be tied to a published criterion, it isn't a reason to give or withhold an award.
- Speak in specifics. The best advocacy sounds like the rubric's top level — heard with specifics. "They redesigned their intake three times and every version is in the notebook" carries more weight than "they seemed strong."
- Represent the teams you interviewed. Your group may be the only judges in the room who met a particular team. Share what you heard and read so every team is weighed on its evidence, not on how familiar the room is with it. The exception is a team you have a personal connection to — like a child or student on its roster — which you should not have interviewed, and do not advocate for in deliberations.
- Expect to be persuaded. Changing your ranking because another judge shared evidence you didn't have is deliberation working exactly as intended — not a loss.
- Make room for every voice. The detail that decides an award is as likely to come from the quietest judge as the most confident one. Volume and repetition are not evidence; if a judge hasn't spoken, ask what they saw.
- "We didn't hear it" counts. Judges evaluate what students said, showed, and documented — not what a team might have done. It is fair to note that something wasn't demonstrated, and just as fair for another group to answer that they heard or saw it.
If the room is stuck, go back to the criteria, the rubrics, and the notes, not necessarily to whoever is most certain.
Selecting Award Winners
- Rank the finalists for each award and identify alternate candidates.
- Raise any Code of Conduct or Student-Centered concerns with the Judge Advisor — judges are not investigators, and concerns are handled outside the deliberation discussion.
- If a team becomes ineligible, the next ranked candidate moves up.
- No team may receive more than one Judged Award. When a team is the top candidate for several, the Judge Advisor facilitates reconciling the results so each team receives the highest-precedence award for which it qualifies.
Confidentiality
Everything in the deliberation room stays there. At the end of the event, give all of your notes, rubrics, and ranking sheets to the Judge Advisor, and delete any photos taken for judging purposes. Award winners are announced at the ceremony — never beforehand, and the discussion behind the decisions is never shared.