Cross-Domain Bias

Cross-domain bias is the documented unreliability of judge scoring when projects in a hackathon span non-commensurate problem domains — for example, when a doctor-appointment app and a satellite orbit modeler are judged on a single shared rubric. The bias manifests in three named ways: hardware-stage bias (visually interesting projects attract more judge attention, as MLH's 2014 organizer essay documented directly), demo-bias (extroverted, polished presenters score higher independent of project quality, as the USC study cited by Eventflare's judging guide found), and rubric mismatch (criteria that implicitly favor one domain's conventions over another's). The principle fair-judging covers the three valid architectural responses; the related glossary terms are rubric, track, and demo-bias.