What each part of the Judges' Room does, and who it is for.
This application replaces the paper that a judging panel would otherwise carry around a venue: the rubrics, the notes, the nomination lists and the deliberation record. Everyone in the room works in the same shared space, and what one judge saves appears on every other device without anyone refreshing anything.
All judging materials are confidential. Rubrics, notes, photos, nominations and rankings stay within the judging panel, and the Judge Advisor destroys them before the award ceremony. Your access link identifies you personally, so treat it like a password and do not pass it to anyone.
Every person in the room has their own link. Opening it signs you in as yourself, so the rubrics you submit are recorded against your name. You can either open the link directly, or paste it into the box on the start screen. A Judge Advisor can also show you a QR code to scan with a phone camera instead of sending anything.
If you lose your link, ask the Judge Advisor. They can copy it again, email it to you, or issue you a new one. Links are personal rather than shared because anyone holding one enters the room as that person.
There is no separate password or PIN. Whoever holds a link is the person it was issued to, which is why it should not be forwarded and why a Judge Advisor can rotate anyone's link, including their own, the moment a device goes astray.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: a tablet left unlocked on a table is a way into the deliberation. Lock your device, and rotate the link rather than hoping, if one is left somewhere it should not be. Event group links work the same way, for every division in the group at once.
Each Judges' Room covers a single division and holds its own teams, judges and rubrics. An event with two divisions is two rooms. A Judge Advisor covering several divisions can tie them together into an event group, so one link opens all of them and Switch event in the menu moves between them; the judging data itself always stays inside its own division.
Overview is the only tab that is always open, and it is where everything else is opened from. The Start panel lists every function available to you. The list differs between judges and Judge Advisors, and grows once award deliberations begin. Below it, Teams and rubrics shows every team with its notebook link, the notebook and interview rubrics submitted for it, and its photo album, with filters for your own judge group, fully developed notebooks, or teams already interviewed.
Everything else opens as a tab alongside it. Tabs can be closed when you are finished with them, and reopened from Overview. A rubric with unsaved changes warns you before its tab closes, and the browser warns you again if you try to leave the page altogether.
The menu in the top right holds everything that is not a judging task:
The indicator in the header shows whether this device is connected. If a phone sleeps or the venue's wireless drops, the application reconnects on its own and catches up on anything it missed. You do not need to reload the page. Work you have typed but not yet submitted stays on your device until you save it.
These are available to everyone in the room, Judge Advisors included.
Marks which teams actually turned up. This matters more than it sounds: an absent team is not eligible for any Judged Award, and the eligibility calculations elsewhere are based on the teams that participated. If the event is linked to VEX Events, attendance is taken from the live rankings and Refresh from VEX Events pulls the current picture; the tab flags any team whose status differs and offers to synchronise. If the event is not linked, mark teams present or absent by hand from the button on each team.
The first pass over the engineering notebooks. Judges scan every notebook quickly and put it in one of three categories: Not Submitted, Developing, or Fully Developed. Where it is unclear which of the last two applies, ask another judge or give the notebook the benefit of the doubt. Fully Developed status is required for Design, Innovate and Excellence Award eligibility.
GRSF asks for the pile to be worked through in a particular order: notebooks handed in with a Season Summary are scored first, and the rest are scored if time remains. A summary points a judge at the entries behind each highlight, which is what makes a thorough score possible in ten minutes; without one, a judge has to find the substance themselves. Tick Submitted with a Season Summary as you scan, and the lists put those teams at the top. The tick is a check for whether a summary is present, not a view on the notebook, and the summaries themselves are never scored.
This only matters when you cannot get to every submitted notebook. If you do sort this way, say so when you introduce the activity, so nobody assumes notebooks went missing.
Every Developing and Fully Developed notebook is then evaluated properly against the rubric. The tab offers a grid or a column view, filters to your own judge group, and shows how many notebooks have been scanned and how many have a completed rubric. If notebooks were submitted digitally, the Event Partner can supply the digital notebook links report from VEX Events, under Event Admin then Downloads & Links, and importing that spreadsheet fills in every team's notebook link at once.
A team that has a notebook link can be scored without being sorted first. The sorting pass was built for a table of physical notebooks a judge can flick through in seconds, which is not something you can do to thirty URLs, and the link is evidence enough that there is a notebook to read. Start rubric is offered for those teams straight away.
If a link arrives for a team already marked Not Submitted, whether you paste it in or it turns up in an import, that team goes back to being unsorted. A notebook marked missing at the door was not missing after all once its link appears, and leaving it as Not Submitted would quietly make it impossible to score. Nothing else is touched: a notebook you have already put in a category keeps it, and re-importing the same report changes nothing.
You are asked which category it belongs in when you submit the rubric, which is the point at which you actually know. The dialog shows the score and notes that GRSF offers 48 out of 64 as a guide to Fully Developed, meaning the notebook averaged Proficient across all 16 criteria. It is a benchmark rather than a rule, so where the cut falls at your event is still your call, and nothing is decided for you. You can change the category later on the Notebook Sorting tab.
The Engineering Notebook Rubric. Choose a team, then score each criterion. Scores are whole points from 1 to 4 against the published scale, and every criterion must be scored before the rubric can be submitted. An unscored criterion shows a dash, and the submit button will tell you which sections are still outstanding. Alongside the scores there is a notes field, a separate field for Innovate Award notes, and the award candidate stars described below.
Submitting a rubric does not lock it: you can reopen and edit your own submissions, and you can start a fresh rubric for another team without leaving the tab. You cannot edit a rubric another judge authored. Theirs is their assessment, and a second opinion belongs in a second rubric rather than on top of the first.
The Team Interview Rubric scores what you actually hear students say. Six criteria over two sections: Explain Your Learning and How You Worked with Others, six points each, twelve in total. Each criterion is one of three choices: Heard, with Specifics (2) where the team gave concrete details, Heard (1) where they addressed it generally, or Not Yet Heard (0) where they could not address it even after a question.
Under each criterion is a list of listen-fors: examples of the kind of evidence that counts. You do not need to hear all of them, and hearing any one of them counts. Each section also carries sample questions; choose two or three to guide the conversation rather than working through the list.
Otherwise it behaves like the notebook rubric: pick the team, score every criterion, add notes, submit. If the event uses pre-assigned judging you can filter the team list to your own group's teams. Any notebook rubric you have already submitted for the same team is linked from here, so you can open it while you talk to them.
You can attach photos of the robot or the interview. Photos are resized on your device before they are sent, and are limited to ten per team, five hundred per room, and 3 MB each. They live inside the event's own database and are destroyed with it.
Stars, from zero to five, recording how strong a candidate a team is for each award. You can set them on the rubric you are filling in, or across the whole team list in the Award ranking tab: click a cell, then use the minus and plus buttons. This table is shared within your judge group and updates live on every judge's device, which is what makes the cross-referencing at deliberations quick rather than a paper exercise.
Both read from VEX Events and exist so that a judge can answer a question about a team without leaving the room to find a field display. Matches shows the schedule and results, filtered to your own group's teams or all of them, plus the division standings with the ranking points. Skills shows the combined skills standings, driver and programming, with attempt counts. Both show when they were last updated and can be refreshed by hand. Neither is available if the event is not linked to VEX Events.
Everything above, plus the following. Entries that judges cannot use are either hidden from them or refuse politely.
Creating an event walks through six steps. Re-running it later from Change event setup in the menu skips the first, because an existing event already has an advisor.
The roster, without walking back through setup. Add, rename or remove judges and judge groups, and drag judges and teams between groups. Useful on the morning when a judge does not arrive and their teams need redistributing.
The Users dialog is where every judge's link is issued. For each person you can copy the link, show a QR code, email it to them if you recorded an address, or email every judge at once. Rotating a link issues a new one and immediately disconnects any device using the old one. That is the tool for a lost phone or a judge who has stepped away from the event. Connected devices are listed under the person they signed in as, so you can see at a glance who is actually in the room.
Who currently meets the performance criteria for the Excellence Award: top 40% of the qualification rankings within this division, top 40% of overall skills at the event, and top 40% of autonomous coding skills with a score above zero. Eligible teams are highlighted, and the tab shows the arithmetic behind each threshold so you can check it rather than trust it.
This is available all day rather than only during deliberations, because eligibility is a live picture that firms up as qualification and skills run, but before deliberations begin the tab says plainly that the standings are provisional. The percentages are based on the teams at the event, or on each grade level for a blended event with two grade-specific Excellence Awards, so check which kind of event you are running. A Judges' Room can only calculate awards for its own division; for an event-wide Excellence Award, use the Excellence Award Eligibility report in Tournament Manager.
A deliberate step, taken once, that unlocks the last three tabs for everyone in the room. Do it when interviews are finished and the panel is ready to decide.
Each judge group puts forward its top one or two candidates for each award from the teams it interviewed, producing a shortlist per award. Where there are many nominations, groups argue their candidates against the award criteria and withdraw the weaker ones. Adding a nomination warns you if the team does not meet the award's requirements (no notebook, notebook not fully developed, no team interview, wrong grade level), and those checks can be bypassed deliberately if you have a reason.
Turns the shortlists into an ordered list of winners. After any follow-up interviews, the judges who conducted them rank the nominees for each award; the practice worth following is a first choice plus three or more alternates, in case a team turns out to be ineligible or to have already won a Judged Award. Drag teams to reorder them.
Excellence Award winners are chosen from the Design Award finalists who also meet the performance criteria, by dragging a team from the Design column into the Excellence column, which may mean reshuffling other awards to keep the one-Judged-Award-per-team rule. Teams in the Excellence and Design columns carry an eligibility badge, green for meeting the 40% criteria and red for not; teams in the Think column show whether they scored above zero in autonomous coding skills. Those badges come from VEX Events, so refresh before relying on them.
Where the final decisions are recorded, including the performance awards and any volunteer-nominated awards, which sit outside the judged deliberation and do not affect a team's eligibility for a Judged Award. The summary at the bottom is organised by team group, and Report produces a copyable version to hand to the emcee. Enter the winners into Tournament Manager before the ceremony.
These two belong together, in that order. Export results produces a record of the outcome that survives the event. Save it as a PDF from your browser's print dialog. It deliberately excludes rubric scores and judge notes, which are confidential to the panel.
Destroy judging data then permanently deletes everything: rubrics, notes, rankings, nominations, photos and access links. You are asked to type destroy to confirm, and offered the export first. This is the step the judging guidelines require before the award ceremony, and it cannot be undone. The materials are not to be handed to the Event Partner for disposal instead. An event nobody opens is deleted automatically after seven days regardless, with a warning email on the sixth.
Entering the event code at setup links the room to events.vex.com. That link is what makes the following work, and without it each falls back to manual entry or disappears:
For any of the live data to arrive, the Event Partner must enable publishing live results to VEX Events on the Web Publish Setup page in Tournament Manager. If results are not being published, the rankings simply never appear and eligibility cannot be calculated.
For a multi-division event, set each team's division in Tournament Manager and publish the division results before creating the rooms, because a Judges' Room needs to know which teams belong to it. Then create one room per division, from a second computer, another browser or a private window, and tie them together with an event group if one Judge Advisor is covering more than one.
Blank rubrics, laid out for A4 and ready to print, for judges who would rather take notes on paper first or as a fallback if a device fails. Scores still have to be entered into the room to count.
Anything this page does not answer, whether that is how something is meant to work, a fault in the application, or a suggestion, please reach out at [email protected].
If you are reporting a fault, open Preferences from the menu and quote both version numbers, along with what you were doing when it happened. Please leave judging content out of the message: team names, scores, notes and photos are confidential to your event, and a description of the problem never needs them.
On the day of an event. We understand that something going wrong mid-competition is a serious problem for the people running it, and we will do our best to help as quickly as we can. We cannot promise a fix will arrive while your event is still running. Please plan on that basis: keep the printable rubrics to hand, and know that everything already submitted is saved and will still be there.
We avoid making changes to the service while events are running. If a critical problem has to be fixed during one, there may be a brief interruption of a minute or two while the service restarts. No judging data is lost when that happens: everything submitted is already stored, devices reconnect on their own, and a restart does not reload your browser, so a rubric you are part way through stays on your screen and can be saved once the connection returns.
See also Data Protection and Privacy.