Judge Assignment

AwardKit supports three strategies for assigning entries to judges. The right mode depends on your program 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 entry. This is the default mode and the simplest option.

Best for:

• Small programs (under 30 entries)
• Programs with few judges (3-5)
• When you want every entry to get the same number of reviews and full panel calibration

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

Per judge

Each judge reviews only the entries 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 entries they review. This mode is useful when you want to distribute entries unevenly. For example, assigning domain experts to review category-specific entries, or routing entries with potential conflicts of interest away from judges connected to the entrant.

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

Auto-assign

Toggle Auto-assign entries to let AwardKit distribute entries evenly across judges. When enabled:

• Existing entries are distributed so each judge gets a roughly equal share
• New entries that come in later are automatically assigned to the next judge in the rotation
• You can set the number of reviews per entry (default 2) to control how many judges see each entry

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

Rooms

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

Best for:

• Large programs (50+ entries)
• Programs with many judges (10+)
• When you need to complete judging quickly by running reviews in parallel
• When you have judges specialized in certain categories and want to group them with the relevant entries

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

Category-specific judge assignment

If you have category-scoped criteria, you can also control which judges see those criteria. This is configured from the setup card, not the assignment mode.

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

See Voting Methods for details.