Basic Rules

  1. All submissions must be made by participants accepted to, and physically at McHacks.
  2. All code written for a submission must be written by the submitting team at McHacks during the designated hacking time, with the exception of third party libraries publicly available to every participant.
  3. All teams must not exceed 4 participants. 
  4. All final judging decisions are at the discretion of the HackMcGill organizing team.
  5. In the event that any of these guidelines are not followed, McHacks reserves the right to revoke prizes and disqualify teams.

Judging

Everyone is a winner at McHacks, but three projects will be more winner than others. Picking these winners out of all the submissions is no joke: We will engage two rounds of serious deliberation by judges, organizers, and even you - the hackers

Round 1:

During the project exhibition period, a panel of judges will visit the projects and assign each project a score. The scores from all the judges will be combined to produce a list of 10 projects that will move on to the next round.

Round 2:

The top 10 teams will do a two minute demo of their project on stage. Everyone at the hackathon - this includes participants, sponsors, and organizers - will vote using a ranked ballot, and the teams with most voting points will be the winners.

 

Questions about voting:

What is a ranked ballot?

A ranked ballot means insteading a voting for your one favorite hack, you will submit an ordered list of 10 projects. The project at position k will receive 10 - k points. This means your first choice will receive 9 points, your second choice 8 points, and your last choice 0 points. This counting system is known as Borda Count.

Why are we not just voting for one project? This is too complicated.

Single choice voting has significant fairness concerns when there are more than two candidates, and when we’re choosing more than a single winner. Here is an exaggerated example that should demonstrate the problem: Assume we’re trying to pick the top two out of three candidates A, B, and C. 99 voters prefer A > B > C, and one voter prefers C > B > A. In a single choice voting system, A will receive 99 votes, C 1 vote, and B 0 vote, and so we will place C second. This is unfortunate - 99 voters prefer B over C. We believe ranked preference voting more faithfully reflects the collective will of the voters.

Can I not rank all 10 projects? This is too much work.

Yes, you can only rank your favorite top k, for any 0 ≤ k ≤ 10. Any project you do not rank will get a score of 0 from your ballot. 

How do I vote? Where is the voting link?

You should receive a unique voting link at the email address you used to register for McHacks. If you’ve been receiving communications from McHacks in that email address, you should have no trouble.

If you are representing a sponsor company or are an invited guest of the hackathon, refer to devpost for a link to the voting website. We will give you a printed voting code that you can use to vote. If you did not get a voting code by the time voting starts, ask any volunteer/organizer.

Refer to https://medium.com/@hackmcgill/mchacks-2016-judging-58ed829df01f#.g8yhb9s70 to learn more about the motivation behind this year’s hybrid judging system.