The Myth of Objective Judging Editor: Jeff 
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About The Editor: Greetings! My name is Jeff  and I'm one of the regular editors of the official Contest & Activities Newsletter! I've been a member of Writing.com since 2003, and have edited more than 500 newsletters across the site in that time. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email me directly or submit feedback in the comment box at the bottom of this newsletter.
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The Myth of Objective Judging
If you've entered a lot of writing contests, you've probably seen the full range of what judging can look like: from the kind that makes you nod along even when you don't place, to the kind that leaves you staring at the results wondering what contest the judge was thinking when they were reading the entries. The case I'd like to make in this newsletter is that the difference between good judging and bad judging has less to do with whether the "right" entry won, and more to do with understanding why a particular entry won.
That distinction matters because what most entrants are really looking for when they talk about fair judging isn't a guarantee that they'll win; most are looking for a guarantee that they were evaluated fairly on well established terms. In other words, that it was a fair fight on a level playing field.
There's a persistent expectation in contest culture that judging should be objective; that if you write a technically excellent entry that addresses the prompt, follows the rules, and demonstrates strong craft, you should win. Or at least place. Or at least not look at the winning entries and think to yourself, "How could the judge have picked that story to win?"
The problem with that expectation is that creative writing is inherently subjective. Two readers can look at the same story and have different responses to it, both of which are genuine and legitimate. A judge who responds more strongly to spare, minimalist prose than to rich, lyrical description isn't making a mistake; they're being human. And no amount of rubric design is going to change the fundamental reality that sometimes the subjective tastes and preferences of a judge will win out over technical achievement.
It's a mistake ti expect objectivity from a process that can't deliver it, and then feel betrayed when it doesn't. A more useful question than, "Was the judging objective?" is instead, "Was the judging fair?" Over the years, I've encountered a lot of judging gone wrong, and it tends to fall into a few recognizable patterns.
The Vague Rubric. This is when the criteria so broad and undefined that it offers no real guidance to entrants and no real accountability for judges. "Entries will be judged on creativity and technical execution" sounds reasonable until you realize it essentially means the judge can prioritize whatever they want among well-written entries. Vague criteria doesn't protect entrants; it gives the judges cover to choose winners based more on vibes than on specifics.
The Rigid Rubric. At the other end of the spectrum is criteria so specific and mechanical that they end up penalizing the entries that took genuine creative risks. I've seen rubrics that allocated points for things like word count proximity to the limit, or the presence of specific structural elements, in ways that rewarded technical compliance over creative ambition. An entry that followed every rule perfectly but had nothing interesting to say could outscore one that bent a minor guideline in service of something genuinely memorable. Rigid criteria doesn't protect entrants; it boxes them in.
Inconsistency of Rules. This is the judging that I often find most frustrating as an entrant myself; when a judge's personal taste clearly overrides the stated criteria. This is the judging equivalent of moving the goalposts. You entered a contest with a specific set of stated priorities, you made creative decisions based on those priorities, and then you find out after the fact that what the judge actually cared about was something that was never in the rubric. Maybe they said their poetry contest was open to all poetic forms, but you find out that structured, formal verse does well and free verse never seems to place. Maybe the rules stated that adherence to genre conventions or tropes would be prioritized, only to see stories with other tropes (or none at all) win time and again. Whatever the specifics, the result is the same: the criteria you were given and the criteria you were actually judged on turned out to be different things.
Inconsistency Across Rounds. Similar to the above, this is where a judge applies criteria differently from one round to the next, so that winning strategies in one round actively work against you in the next. This is particularly damaging in recurring contests where entrants are trying to learn and improve over time. If the standards keep shifting without explanation, there's nothing to learn from. Which is not to say that a judge has to be so predictable so as to allow the entrants to explicitly pander to their tastes and preferences, but if you see a judge picking winners for one round based on genre elements, and another round based on technical proficiency, and another round based on the most unconventional take on the prompt, it can be very difficult to get a sense of how judging will be done the next time around.
Given all of this, it might be tempting to conclude that rubrics are the solution; that if organizers just designed better, more detailed criteria, the judging would be fairer. And, to be clear, rubrics are valuable. But it's worth being clear about what they can and can't actually accomplish.
A rubric cannot make judging objective. The judge is still a human being with tastes, preferences, and blind spots, and those things will always influence how they respond to an entry at a gut level. If a judge doesn't like supernatural horror, it might be a hard sell to get them to lift up your zombie story or poem about ghosts at the end of the judging period. What a rubric can do, though, is make the judge's priorities transparent to entrants before they write their entries, and give the judge a framework for applying those priorities consistently. It won't eliminate subjectivity entirely, but it will clearly define it. An entrant who knows going in that a judge values emotional impact over technical precision can make informed creative decisions. So too can an entrant who knows going in that the judge prefers longer, more descriptive poems like sonnets, rather than shorter more figuative forms like haiku.
An entrant who finds these kind of things out after the fact — when it's too late to do anything about it — will just feel like they were operating with incomplete information. Or maybe even set up to fail.
The best rubrics I've encountered as an entrant are the ones that tell me not just what will be evaluated, but what the judge actually cares about within each category. Not just "craft" but "clarity of prose and strength of voice." Not just "creativity" but "originality of interpretation and willingness to take risks with the prompt." That level of specificity doesn't constrain entrants; it gives them something real to aim for and something real to measure themselves against when the results come in.
My definition of fair judging is straightforward, even if achieving it consistently is harder than it sounds: clear criteria, applied consistently, with enough transparency so that entrants can understand how decisions were made even if they disagree with them. Clear criteria means the rubric says what it means: specific enough that two different entrants reading it would make similar inferences about what the judge is looking for. Consistent application means the same standards are applied to every entry in the round, and from round to round in a recurring contest. And transparency after the fact means the judge does the work of explaining not just who won, but why. What specifically distinguished the winning entry, what creative decisions it made that resonated, and maybe even what the entries that didn't place might consider for next time.
That last piece is the one most often skipped, and it's the one that matters most for the long-term health of a contest community. Just announcing winners is technically judging, but at the barest most administative level. Genuine judging feedback closes the loop between the criteria you set and the decisions you made, and gives entrants something to carry forward into the next round. Some judges give this feedback in the forms of reviews of the entries that anyone can go and read. But if formal reviews aren't your thing as a judge, consider maybe including a few sentences when you announce the winners about why they won.
When entrants complain about unfair judging, they're usually not really arguing that a different entry should have won. Sure, there are always those people who will feel like they deserve to win every contest they enter but — aside from those — what most people are expressing is the feeling that they weren't evaluated on the terms they were given. That the playing field turned out to be different from the one they thought they were standing on.
That feeling is preventable. Not by making judging objective — that's not possible — but by making it transparent. Tell entrants what you're looking for before they write, and be specific. Apply those criteria consistently. Explain your decisions afterward. You won't eliminate disagreement, and you won't make everyone happy with the results. But you'll build trust in an honest process, even when the outcome wasn't what someone hoped for.
Until next time,
Jeff
If you're interested in checking out my work:
"New & Noteworthy Things" | "Blogocentric Formulations"
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| | Musicology Anthology (13+) An annual challenge to write a short story collection based on an album! Runs April-June. |
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Feedback from "Contests & Activities Newsletter (May 6, 2026)" about the ethics of AI in contests:
Hello Jeff! I always enjoy reading your newsletters, and you make some excellent observations on AI and its usage.
IMHO, it is a slippery slope to accuse an author of using AI. People use an AI detector, which, ironically, as you stated, is AI. AI detecting AI. I have been told that the one sure way to detect AI is by the repeated usage of three, a type of rhythm. Such as "The mountain was speaking with coldness and authority." I object to that simple rule. That, to me, is creativity. It is a creative rhythm. It's a description choice most authors use, albeit sparingly. I submitted writings and theses I wrote in the 1980s through various AI detectors. Many friends have done the same. They all came back with at least 80% AI. So we all asked, "Is this the way we were taught to write?" The answer isn't just simple; it is scary. Yes, AI is what it has been fed. It is a conglomerate of our creativity, now being used against us.
— Spiderwriter 
HI there Jeff I so agree with your viewpoint on this. I have a friend who has written several books with the help of AI. I don't think she has it write the story for her but it is involved. For me I started using it to check my grammar, make sure the story sounds ok I will also use it for research and help me develop pictures of my characters and setting and help with giving me names and sometimes even for research so I can visualize the setting and my characters. We need to use AI as a tool but not let it do the whole thing for us. To me that is not writing when you ask AI to do it. Thanks for this fantastic informative newsletter. Blessings. :) Bill
— W.P. Gerace 
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Contests & Activities: June 03, 2026 Issue [#13780]
