How the jury
actually scores you.
GQC publishes its rubric in full. Judges score against the same five criteria at every edition and at the Global Final, and every team — winner or not — receives a written critique mapped to those criteria.
Five criteria. One hundred points.
- Problem clarity
- How sharply the team frames the problem and the people it affects. Strong entries name a specific user, a specific failure mode, and a specific reason the existing options fall short.
- Research & evidence
- Quality of primary research (interviews, fieldwork, original data), depth of secondary sources, and honesty about the limits of what the team has been able to learn so far.
- Solution & feasibility
- Whether the proposed intervention follows logically from the evidence, whether it could realistically be built or run, and whether the team has begun to test it (a working prototype, a pilot, a usable artefact).
- Impact pathway
- A plausible route from prototype to meaningful change at meaningful scale. Includes ethical considerations, second-order effects and a credible answer to “who would block this, and why?”
- Communication
- Clarity of the written evidence pack, design of the slide deck, and command of the live six-minute defence — including how the team responds to challenging questions.
Three independent reads, one panel session.
Every entry that reaches the showcase is read by three judges independently before any panel discussion. Each judge files a written score sheet broken down by the five criteria above, plus a short qualitative critique. The three sheets are released to the team after the showcase, with judge names anonymised.
For finalist teams, a panel session combines the three reads with the live pitch and a fifteen-minute oral defence. The panel must agree by majority on rank order; disagreements are recorded and shared with the team where relevant.
This structure is closer to the peer-review processes used at academic conferences and at programmes such as the Regeneron Science Talent Search than it is to traditional pitch-day competitions. We are willing to trade a little theatre for considerably more useful feedback.
What winning means.
- City Winner · per edition
- Awarded to the top-scoring team in each track at each regional showcase. Includes a £15,000 seed grant, a year of post-programme mentorship, and a guaranteed slot at the Global Final.
- Founder’s Prize
- For the project judged most likely to become a real venture, business or non-profit. £25,000 grant and a partner-led accelerator place.
- Research Prize
- For the project that most advances understanding of its problem area, independent of commercial promise. £15,000 grant, with a route to publication in a partner journal.
- Impact Prize
- For the project that demonstrates the most credible pathway to public benefit. £15,000 grant and a placement with a partner civic body.
- GQC Medal
- Awarded to one team across all tracks for the year’s strongest overall body of work. Engraved medal and a permanent place in the GQC alumni council.
Claim, material, verification, limit — against the published weights.
This table does not add criteria. Weights stay Problem 20 / Research 25 / Solution 25 / Impact 20 / Communication 10. Invented demonstration only.
| Claim | Material in the pack | How a juror checks it | Limit the team names | Rubric line |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper attendance costs ~40 minutes before tutoring starts. | Shadowing notes from two Tuesdays; photocopy of the roll. | Ask who timed it and whether both Tuesdays agree. | Two evenings, one room. Not a city average. | Problem 20 |
| Staff will trial a paper-plus-phone log. | Named staff email agreeing to three Tuesdays. | Look for a date and a name, not a slogan. | Agreement to trial is not adoption. | Research 25 |
| A log that runs without a tablet is feasible here. | Paper form + a phone note a juror can open in the room. | Use it. If it needs a miracle network, feasibility fails. | Does not claim a product company. | Solution 25 |
| If the log is faster, tutors keep using it after we leave. | One next experiment: time three more Tuesdays; stop if it is slower. | Ask who would block it (the centre manager) and why. | No scale story past this classroom. | Impact 20 |
| The six-minute defence can retell the 40 minutes without a script. | One-page handout that matches the pack. | Ask a hard question; “we do not know, here is how we would find out” is allowed. | Theatre does not add points. | Communication 10 |