It is very easy to under-estimate judging time for your awards. Remember, you are asking busy professionals to score hundreds of entries while maintaining their day jobs (and sometimes for free), it’s important to build some flexibility into your process and reduce the ask as much as possible without sacrificing the quality of the scoring.
This calculator will help you with actual numbers: how many judges you need, how long it really takes, and what happens when you get it wrong. It will help you understand what to worry about before you recruit judges and make the correct decisions early on.
A note on the numbers: We’ve used 2 minutes as a baseline to review an entry and assumed each entry needs 3 scores to reduce bias. But this could be far more if your entry form is thorough, you have many scoring criteria, or your process is heavy on administration (spreadsheets, attachments, back-and-forth emails).
Scenarios
| Number of Judges | Entries per Judge | Total Hours per Judge | Timeline (weeks) |
|---|
What These Numbers Mean in Practice
500 entries with 5 judges sounds manageable
Each judge reviews 300 entries (100 per score × 3 scores per entry). At 2 minutes each, that’s 10 hours of work. Spread over 2 hours weekly, you’re looking at 5 weeks minimum – add buffer time and you’re at 6-7 weeks. Miss this by recruiting too few judges and your March announcement becomes May.
1,000 entries isn’t twice the work if your process is manual it’s much more
You need 6-10 judges minimum. Coordinating 10 judges is fundamentally different from coordinating 3. You need progress tracking, systems for handling questions. Spreadsheets stop working. One judge dropping out is a 10% capacity loss, not a 33% crisis.
50,000 entries requires 150+ judges
This sounds absurd until you realize the alternative: asking 50 judges to work 150 hours each over 40 weeks. At this scale, you’re not running a competition – you’re running a major infrastructure project. Two-round judging is the minimum (and you should probably have more rounds!)
The 2-hour weekly commitment is balanced, but 5 would be optimistic
Judges have lives. They travel. They get sick. Someone will submit late entries that need reviewing. Your 5 hours becomes 2 hours becomes “I’ll catch up next week” becomes dropout. Always add buffer weeks to whatever this calculator shows you.
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Guy Armitage is the founder of Zealous and author of “Everyone is Creative“. He is on a mission to amplify the world’s creative potential.
