How the jury
actually scores you.
GQC publishes its rubric in full. Judges score against the same five criteria at every edition and at the Global Final, and every team — winner or not — receives a written critique mapped to those criteria.
Five criteria. One hundred points.
- Problem clarity
- How sharply the team frames the problem and the people it affects. Strong entries name a specific user, a specific failure mode, and a specific reason the existing options fall short.
- Research & evidence
- Quality of primary research (interviews, fieldwork, original data), depth of secondary sources, and honesty about the limits of what the team has been able to learn so far.
- Solution & feasibility
- Whether the proposed intervention follows logically from the evidence, whether it could realistically be built or run, and whether the team has begun to test it (a working prototype, a pilot, a usable artefact).
- Impact pathway
- A plausible route from prototype to meaningful change at meaningful scale. Includes ethical considerations, second-order effects and a credible answer to “who would block this, and why?”
- Communication
- Clarity of the written evidence pack, design of the slide deck, and command of the live six-minute defence — including how the team responds to challenging questions.
Three independent reads, one panel session.
Every entry that reaches the showcase is read by three judges independently before any panel discussion. Each judge files a written score sheet broken down by the five criteria above, plus a short qualitative critique. The three sheets are released to the team after the showcase, with judge names anonymised.
For finalist teams, a panel session combines the three reads with the live pitch and a fifteen-minute oral defence. The panel must agree by majority on rank order; disagreements are recorded and shared with the team where relevant.
This structure is closer to the peer-review processes used at academic conferences and at programmes such as the Regeneron Science Talent Search than it is to traditional pitch-day competitions. We are willing to trade a little theatre for considerably more useful feedback.
What winning means.
- City Winner · per edition
- Awarded to the top-scoring team in each track at each regional showcase. Includes a £15,000 seed grant, a year of post-programme mentorship, and a guaranteed slot at the Global Final.
- Founder’s Prize
- For the project judged most likely to become a real venture, business or non-profit. £25,000 grant and a partner-led accelerator place.
- Research Prize
- For the project that most advances understanding of its problem area, independent of commercial promise. £15,000 grant, with a route to publication in a partner journal.
- Impact Prize
- For the project that demonstrates the most credible pathway to public benefit. £15,000 grant and a placement with a partner civic body.
- GQC Medal
- Awarded to one team across all tracks for the year’s strongest overall body of work. Engraved medal and a permanent place in the GQC alumni council.