Judging Process 

2024 Dates
Judging from Saturday 7 Sept to Saturday 21 Sept
Award Ceremony Friday 22 November at UTS

There are two major categories in the Young Scientist Awards: Scientific Investigations, and Technological Innovations.
Within each category there are six age groups. Each is judged separately.

  • The secondary (Years 7-8, Years 9-10 and 11-12 age groups) scientific investigation categories are usually our largest, and are further divided into scientific disciplines
  • Biology
  • Chemistry
  • Physics
  • Earth and Environmental Science
  • It is important to note that the same judging criteria apply to each of these four disciplines. For instance, students entering into Chemistry will be judged primarily on their investigative skills and not necessarily on their chemistry knowledge and use of chemical formulae.
  • A separate set of criteria is used to judge environmental or astronomical surveys (as these projects do not usually have a hypothesis). However they will compete within the relevant discipline category.

 

Judging criteria

All projects are judged using a unique set of age-specific judging rubrics. These rubrics are used by the judges to assign a Level 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 to each student project.  Student projects are assessed holistically and judges are trained to assign the level where the project best fits overall. These criteria are closely tied to the processes of Working Scientifically and Working Technologically in the respective NSW Syllabus documents.

Each student is awarded a certificate based on their level of attainment of specified criteria given in the scoring rubric for their age and category:

  • High Distinction Certificate for every student who achieves a level 5 against the rubric.
  • Distinction Certificate for every student who achieves a level 4 against the rubric.
  • Credit Certificate for every student who achieves a level 3 against the rubric.
  • Certificates of Participation for every student entry.

We recommend that students read the criteria before starting their project, and also at the end as a checklist that everything has been included. Teachers are welcome to use the rubrics as the basis of school assessment tasks.

Each Sponsored Award has specific judging criteria, outlined on our Prizes webpage.

Rubrics:

Please see Rubrics page 

 

How judging works

To make our judging process as objective as possible we have adopted a multi-stage judging process:

Stage 1: Double marking 
This is the largest stage of judging, involving multiple teams of volunteer judges. Projects are marked by at least two judges. Judges allocate a holistic grade to a project, from Level 1 (lowest) to Level 5 (highest), using the relevant rubric. From this stage, projects are short-listed for category and special prizes.

Stage 2: More rigorous reading of short-listed projects, followed by a discussion of winners for that specific category. Stage 2 judging is conducted by the senior assessors for that category and nominated experienced judges. Special prizes are judged using criteria specified by the prize sponsors. Senior assessors also select the best 15-20 overall projects in the Secondary age category to be submitted to an external panel of independent experts for Stage 3 judging.

Stage 3: An external panel is composed of 4 or 5 experienced and independent judges, who are not privy to the results of the prior stages of judging. This panel picks the Grand Award winners.

Conflict of Interest: At each stage of judging, no judge is to assess or be involved in decision-making, where there is a possible (even perceived) conflict of interest. Please see our Rules page for details of conflict of interest situations.