Judging
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.
The rubric
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.
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Method
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.
Prizes
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.
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“We tell juries: if a team admits what it doesn’t know, give them more points, not fewer. That’s the signal we care about.”
From the GQC Jury Handbook, 2026 edition
Score bands and process
What a 4, a 7 and a 9 actually mean.
- Problem clarity — 20 points
- A 4 names a topic (“mental health”) without a user or a failure mode. A 7 names a user and a setting but still treats the problem as obvious. A 9 specifies who is failed, by what existing option, and why the team is close enough to learn. Juries punish ambition that has no location.
- Research & evidence — 25 points
- A 4 is a literature dump or a survey of classmates. A 7 has some primary contact and a source list a second reader can follow, but over-claims. A 9 shows interviews or field notes, states limits, and does not pretend a convenience sample is a population. Honesty about what you did not learn scores higher than a polished bibliography.
- Solution & feasibility — 25 points
- A 4 is a slide. A 7 is a prototype or campaign artefact that almost runs, with a write-up that skips failure modes. A 9 is something a juror can use in the room, plus a technical or campaign note that admits what would break at the next order of magnitude. Feasibility includes who would operate this on a Tuesday.
- Impact pathway — 20 points
- A 4 assumes adoption because the idea is good. A 7 has a plausible next user but no antagonist. A 9 names who would block the work, what second-order harm is possible, and one next experiment that is smaller than a “scale strategy.” Ethics lives here as well as in the Digital track’s dedicated page.
- Communication — 10 points
- Weighted last on purpose. Clear writing and a composed defence help; theatre does not. Teams that handle a hard question by saying “we do not know, here is how we would find out” outscore teams that fill the silence.
- How the panel works
- Three independent reads of the pack, then a live session. No single juror can champion a team through. Conflicts (former school, family, investor relationship) are declared and the juror steps out. Written critiques are signed by two reviewers and mapped to these five lines. Appeals on process (a missing pack, a timing error) go to the city chair within five days; appeals on taste are not heard.
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