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If you are interested in volunteering to judge the Science and Engineering Fair, we believe you will find it a fulfilling experience. Without our volunteer judges, the Science and Engineering Fair would not be the rewarding experience it is for the students of St. Mary’s County.
Contact: sciencefair@smcsef.org
All information, guidelines and judging forms will be distributed to volunteer judges via email.
Students will be registered for the fair by category. Category descriptions are defined by the International Science Fair and can be found at https://www.societyforscience.org/isef/categories-and-subcategories/
We will need both category judges as well as special and grand award judges.
The Judging role is multi-faceted. Judging is more than putting scores on paper. As a judge, you will step into a number of roles on judging day. Fulfilling all of these roles is important to a successful science fair. You may not fill all of these roles as a judge when interviewing a student, but through the morning, you will have the opportunity to exercise all of the roles throughout the judging experience.
The main role of a Judge is to evaluate the various projects in a category or division and assign them a score. This is usually done before the students arrive in the morning. You will first be evaluating the project based on what you see.
Later in the morning, you get to meet the students. You will still be evaluating the project, and you will also be a Facilitator, creating an open and positive atmosphere to allow the student to comfortably tell you about their project and the research that they did. This role is important because the quality of your facilitation will result in the amount of information you will receive to make an accurate evaluation of the project as a whole.
When a student asks you, “What could I have done better in this project?” you have then stepped into the role of a counselor. You can make a recommendation of what could have taken the project up to the next level of quality. It is better to let the students answer this themselves. Ask them if they’ve thought of the “next step” or a better procedure.
An important role of a judge is to give the student some compliments that will make them feel good about their work and motivate them to compete again. The students have put in a lot of work to compete in the fair and should be complimented on that. The simplest compliment given to a student can spur them on to future success in life.
Remember that when communicating with the students, you are in the role of the judge, a leader in the community, from business, government or academia. Your actions portray to the students what the science fair is all about. Take care in what you do and say in the presence of the students.
Thank you so much for considering to judge the St. Mary’s County Science and Engineering Fair. We hope to hear from you soon regarding your interest in helping us at the upcoming science and engineering fair.
