How is Judging done? There are many answers to that question!
Pre-judging
Category Awards Judging
Sponsored Awards Judging
Isabelle Stone and Castro Family Awards
Grand Prize Judging
California Science & Engineering Fair (CSEF) Judging
Are 1st place Category awards at the Synopsys Championship automatically qualified for CSEF or ISEF?
Can I get feedback from the judges after the fair?
Why aren’t results posted immediately?
Pre-judging
Category judges will begin looking at your Abstract on March 12, 2024. Abstracts should be posted by March 5th at 11:59pm. Sponsored Awards and Grand Prize judges will begin looking at folders on March 9th.
Category Awards Judging
A judging team of two to four judges will be assigned to each group of 8 to 12 projects. At least two judges must evaluate each project. These judges are instructed to choose first, second, and/or honorable mention awards from their group of projects. Projects are judged with projects from the same category and with similar fields of study.
Projects done at home, in schools, or in the field are compared to each other and judged with others done by students in the same grade. Math projects may be grouped for middle school grades and for high school grades. Grade 11 and 12 projects may be judged together by Category Judges to improve the quality of judging.
Projects done at Regulated Research Institutions (RRI) such as universities or major research laboratories (Grade 9 to 12 only) are judged by a separate group of category judges and are only compared with other RRI projects. RRI projects are judged by category only.
Judges use the Category Judging Criteria posted on our website to select approximately 40% of the projects in their group to win category awards (so 60% of projects do not win category awards).
A very short oral project summary by the student (no more than one to two minutes) without charts or a formal presentation starts the interview. Then the judges will ask questions about your work, view your project notebook or work logs, and may ask questions about your abstract.
Sponsored Awards
Sponsored Awards are handled by the organization sponsoring each award. The criteria for the award are determined by the sponsoring organization, and they usually provide the judging team.
Some of these judging teams try to look at every project while others are interested only in projects that match the criteria for their organizations (for example, they may consider only projects related to water). The judges often use the titles and abstracts of the projects to determine whether a project will be reviewed.
Isabelle Stone and Castro Family Awards will be judged
These middle school awards (one project per grade as best in Biological Sciences and best in Physical Sciences) will be judged at the Synopsys Championship.
Grand Prize Judging
Grand Prize judging includes all projects in grades 9 through 12. Projects are divided into 3 groups. The two main groups are Physical Science projects and Biological Science projects. The third group is an Outreach group that Society for Science and the Public (administrators of ISEF) allows us to have in addition to our two main groups; it includes projects from schools that traditionally graduate fewer STEM bound students.
The Grand Prize Judging Team is separate from the Category Judging and Sponsored Award judging teams. Judges for the Grand Prizes have either a doctorate in their field or equivalent experience, the same requirements in place for ISEF judges. Some of these judges also judge at ISEF.
In addition to identifying the Grand Prize winners and the Grand Prize alternates, the Grand Prize judging teams rank the other outstanding high-school projects.
California Science & Engineering Fair (CSEF) Judging
All the Grand Prize projects, including alternates, are qualified to participate at the California Science & Engineering Fair (CSEF).
The California Science & Engineering Fair Judging team then uses the additional ranking information from the Grand Prize judging teams and their own assessment of other outstanding projects to identify other candidates for the CSEF. In determining whom to select, they factor in the judging categories that the CSEF uses (which are very different from both the Synopsys Championship categories and the ISEF categories).
Winning a first place category award does not guarantee selection for CSEF as either a candidate or alternate.
We use an algorithm to choose the remaining projects for CSEF. Each project gets points for category, sponsored and grand prize judging team recommendations. We then round-robin through the categories starting with the top scoring projects until we have filled our quota. There are usually 5 or 6 projects max per category at the end of this process.
Because of this, second place projects with large numbers of sponsored awards or in fields of study that are less populated may be chosen over first place awards in impacted fields of study (like software engineering or bioinformatics).
Are the students receiving 1st place Category awards at the Synopsys Championship automatically qualified for CSEF or ISEF?
No, there is not necessarily a relationship between winning a 1st place category award, and winning a place at CSEF or ISEF. Separate judging teams determine awarding of these 3 award types. Category Awards are determined by Category Award Judges and there are over 100 winners at our competition. ISEF trip awards are given by a separate group of Grand Prize Judges whose responsibility is to choose the top 10-12 high school projects in the whole fair. CSEF trip awards are given by a separate State Fair Judging Team who choose the top projects as described in the above paragraph. The determination of how many projects may be sent to State Fair is made by the California Science & Engineering Fair administration based on our previous 5-year record of winning at that fair.
Can I get feedback from the judges after the fair?
Students should not contact judges after the fair to get comments on their projects. A few judges have substantive comments that they wish to share with students after the fair, and these comments will be emailed to the students in the several weeks after the fair. Unfortunately, we cannot answer questions about the judge’s comments. Most students will not receive comments.
Why aren’t results posted immediately?
Although most of the results are entered into our database within an hour or so of judging being over, we don’t post them to the website right away for a number of reasons:
- The main reason is we want the results to be a surprise at the awards ceremony. Occasionally deadlines for subsequent fairs prevent us from doing that, so we contact the affected students before the awards ceremony, but as much as possible, we do want it to be a surprise.
- Occasionally, we (or a judging team) discover that a student’s project was not really as presented and an award that was planned must be retracted—this may require consultation with the respective judging team and review of their notes to determine the next most meritorious project.
- All of the people involved in the Synopsys Championship judging are volunteers who have spent many hours preparing for and administering this large fair. We have found that a complete double-check of the awards data entry the following weekend helps us detect and properly correct any errors that might occur.
