Hackathon Management Portal with Judging and Leaderboard

College hackathons are usually managed across a form tool, a spreadsheet of scores and a chat group — judges score in isolation, nobody trusts the final ranking, and results take hours to compile. The fix is a single system where submissions, rubrics and scores live together: judges score against weighted criteria, the leaderboard recomputes on every submission, and every score is attributable. This project builds that portal: a public event site (tracks, prizes, schedule, countdown), team registration with invite codes, project submission with repo and demo links, a judge console with per-criterion sliders, a live leaderboard with track filters, and an organizer dashboard for announcements and score audits.

1. Organizers configure the event: tracks, prize pool, schedule, judging rubric weights and registration window.
2. Teams register with invite codes; the roster view shows team size, track and members to organizers.
3. Before the deadline, teams submit their project: repository URL, demo link, write-up and track; submissions lock automatically at the cutoff.
4. Judges open the scoring console, which assigns them a queue of submissions; each criterion gets a 1–10 score plus optional comments.
5. On submit, the scoring engine stores the judge's scores, recomputes the team's weighted average, and pushes the new ranking to all leaderboard viewers over WebSocket.
6. The audit view flags outlier scores (e.g. one judge far from the panel mean) for organizer review before results finalize.
7. Organizers lock the leaderboard, publish winners per track, and the system generates certificates for teams.

Tech stack:

• Node.js + Express (portal + scoring engine)
• PostgreSQL (events, teams, submissions, scores)
• WebSocket push (live leaderboard)
• JWT (organizer/judge/team roles)
• Nodemailer (invites, announcements)
• PDF certificate generator
• Docker + docker-compose

• [Event site] Tracks, prize pool, schedule, mentors, judges and a live countdown — the public face of the hackathon.
• [Team registration] Create or join teams with invite codes, capped team sizes and per-track registration.
• [Project submissions] Submit with repo link, demo video, write-up and track selection; editing locked after the deadline.
• [Rubric-based judging] Weighted criteria (innovation, execution, impact, demo quality) with per-criterion scoring and comments.
• [Live leaderboard] Rankings recompute on every submitted score via WebSocket push, with track filters and judge-progress indicators.
• [Score audit] Organizers see every score per judge per team, with outlier flagging for suspicious spreads.
• [Announcements] Broadcast updates to all teams with read receipts on the dashboard.
• [Certificates] Auto-generated participation and winner certificates after results are finalized.

• Public event site with tracks, schedule and countdown
• Team registration and roster management
• Project submission flow with deadline locking
• Judge scoring console with weighted rubrics
• Live leaderboard with track filters and audit view
• Announcements and certificate generation
• Project report PDF (scoring model, live-update design, fairness measures, methodology, results)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document (weighted scoring, WebSocket push, RBAC, outlier detection)

• Judging fairness tooling flags statistical outliers; it cannot detect off-platform collusion — the report states this boundary honestly.
• The leaderboard reflects submitted scores only; teams see judge progress but not individual judges' scores until results are published.
• Team sizes and track caps are enforced at registration; mid-event team merges need organizer action.
• Video demos are linked (YouTube/unlisted), not hosted — the portal stores metadata, not video files.
• Certificates are generated from a fixed template set; fully custom designs are future scope.
• The demo runs a single event at a time; multi-event tenancy is future scope.