CORE CONCEPTS

Rubrics & scoring

A rubric is the scoring framework your reviewers use. Each rubric has one or more criteria. Each criterion has a weight (how much it counts) and a max score (how high reviewers can go).

A simple example

For an awards program judging small businesses, you might use a rubric like this:

Criterion	Weight	Max score
Business viability	30%	5
Community impact	30%	5
Innovation	20%	5
Long-term vision	20%	5

A reviewer scores each criterion from 0 to 5. Awards Manager calculates the weighted total automatically.

Weights

Weights tell Awards Manager how much each criterion counts in the final score. They should add up to 100 percent. If they do not, the math still works because the system normalizes, but the numbers read more cleanly when they total 100.

If you do not care about weighting and everything matters equally, set them all to the same number. For example, 25 percent each across four criteria.

Max scores

Most rubrics use a 0 to 5 scale. Some use 0 to 10 or 0 to 100. Use whatever scale feels natural for your judges. The system handles any scale.

Score guides

For each criterion you can include a score guide. This is a short paragraph that says what each score level means. For example:

5: Exceptional, industry-leading example
4: Strong, notable achievement
3: Solid, meets expectations
2: Mixed, some gaps
1: Weak, significant concerns

Reviewers see this guide when they are scoring. It dramatically improves consistency across different reviewers.

How averages get calculated

For each submission, Awards Manager computes three values:

Average. The weighted average across all reviewers' scores.
Median. The middle value, helpful for spotting outliers.
Spread. The gap between the highest and lowest reviewer score. A wide spread flags disagreement between reviewers.

You see these on the Scores page, ranked within each category.