Judge Assignment

Control how judges are assigned to submissions on HackHQ. Review all, assign per judge with auto-distribution, or organize into parallel judging rooms.

HackHQ supports three strategies for assigning submissions to judges. The right mode depends on your event size and number of judges. Toggle between them using the segmented control at the top of the Judge Voting section.

All judges

Every judge reviews every submission. This is the default mode and the simplest option.

Best for:

Small events (under 30 submissions)
Events with few judges (3-5)
When you want every project to get the same number of reviews

No configuration needed. Every submission is visible to every judge.

Per judge

Each judge reviews only the submissions assigned to them. This gives you fine-grained control over who reviews what.

Each judge card gains an Assignments button where you can manually pick which submissions they review. This mode is useful when you want to distribute submissions unevenly, for example assigning domain experts to review relevant projects, or routing submissions from a specific track or challenge to judges with the right expertise.

The picker groups submissions by track and challenge. Use the Select all / Clear shortcuts in each section header to bulk assign or remove an entire track or challenge in one click. You can still toggle individual submissions to add overrides on top of bulk selections.

Auto-assign

Toggle Auto-assign submissions to let HackHQ distribute submissions evenly across judges. When enabled:

Existing submissions are distributed so each judge gets a roughly equal share
New submissions that come in later are automatically assigned
You can set the number of reviews per submission (default 2) to control how many judges review each project

Turning auto-assign on will redistribute all current assignments. You'll see a confirmation dialog if there are existing votes or assignments.

Rooms

Organize judges and submissions into independent rooms for parallel judging. Each room operates separately with its own set of judges and submissions.

Best for:

Large events with 50+ submissions
Events with many judges (10+)
When you need to complete judging quickly by running reviews in parallel
When you have judges specialized in certain tracks and want to group them with the relevant submissions

Click Add Room to create rooms, then assign judges and submissions to each one. Toggle Auto-assign to rooms to let HackHQ distribute both judges and submissions evenly across rooms. You can also set up rooms manually, for example creating a room for each track with the judges who have the right expertise for those submissions.

For a 50-team hackathon with 10 judges, consider 2 rooms of 5 judges each. This halves the review load per judge while maintaining multiple reviewers per submission.

Track and challenge judge assignment

If you have track or challenge criteria, you can also control which judges see those criteria. This is configured from the setup card, not the assignment mode.

Each track criteria section has a Judges button that opens a panel where you can assign specific judges to that track's criteria. This is separate from the general submission assignment and works alongside any assignment mode.

See Voting Methods for details.