The recommended software for the PCSC judging standard.
The Pitch Competition Standards Council publishes the open judging standard for pitch competitions. Every new LiveJudge pitch event starts preloaded with its divisions, weights and anchored rubric.
Run a pitch or academic competition where the scoring holds up.
LiveJudge is judging software for pitch and academic competitions. You build the rubric, judges score from their own phones with nothing to install, and results are normalized so a hard-marking VC and a generous professor carry the same weight.
Your criteria. Your weights. On their phone.
A pitch is judged on more than one axis, and the axes are not equal. LiveJudge takes the rubric you already argue about in the planning meeting and puts it in front of the panel exactly as you wrote it: your criteria, your weights, your score increments.
Judges score on a color-graded slider per criterion, with the written guidance for that band sitting under it. Prefer eyes on the founder instead of the screen? Heads-Up Mode swaps the sliders for tap buttons. Nothing to download, no passwords, and no venue WiFi to arrange.
One element can split into several criteria, so "Problem & Market" is scored as the pain and the market separately rather than as one blunt number. Add a second round, a finals round, or a separate track and the same rubric carries across, or a different one does. That is your call, not the software's.
Pain Severity
8.3Credible pain, but the customer stays fuzzy.
Market Size
6.9Plausible market, thinly segmented.
Beachhead
8.5Sensible beachhead, needs sharpening.
Drag any slider. The guidance and the score follow.
A bigger seat.
All the same features.
Hand a judge any tablet in landscape and LiveJudge opens a larger judging layout. Every element sits in a rail with its running subtotal, and the open element fills the screen with bigger sliders and room to read the guidance.
Turn it sideways
Any tablet in landscape gets the larger layout. Nothing to install or switch on.
All the same features
Slider and heads-up modes, written guidance, the same weighting and the same math.
Next, not back
Previous and Next buttons on every element, so heads-up judges never hunt for the list.
Preview it first
Tap Tablet View in Class Studio to see exactly what your judges will see.
A kind judge's 7.5 is not a grumpy judge's 7.5.
The judging screen shows 1-10 sliders for each evaluation criterion. Look at the difference between a bare 1-10 slider and a "judge guided" version of the same slider.
Without judge guidance, two judges evaluating the same thing might land on wildly varying scores.
Band 4 of 6Credible pain, but the customer stays fuzzy.
Both judges are reading the same sentence, so both land in band 4. They still do not agree exactly, and closing that last gap is what normalization is for.
Your panel is an investor, an operator and a professor, and they have never scored together before this morning. Hand all three a bare 1 to 10 scale and the same pitch comes back a 9 and a 6, because a 7.5 means something different to each of them. None of them is wrong. Nobody ever told them what a 7.5 is.
So LiveJudge tells them, on the screen, while they score. Any criterion can carry six written bands in your words, and the guidance under the slider rewrites itself the moment the score crosses into the next one. Start from the PCSC standard and those bands arrive already written.
That pulls a panel together at the source, before a single algorithm runs. Normalization still settles the judge who marks hard. It simply has far less left to fix.
Six bands, your words
Write what a 4 looks like and what a 9 looks like once, when you build the rubric. Judges score against your definition instead of their own.
It rewrites as they score
Move the slider and the sentence underneath changes to the band the score just landed in. Every criterion carries its own.
No calibration meeting
Investor judges will not sit through a briefing. The standard is on the screen while they score, so a replacement at 8am is not a crisis.
Then the math runs
Anchored marks arrive closer together, so normalization and the high/low drop are correcting a smaller gap, not rescuing the result.
Judge 4 grades everyone hard. Every opinion counts equally here, which drags this contestant down.
Five judges never agree. That should not pick the winner.
Every pitch panel has one judge who never gives above an 8 and one who never gives below a 9. On a paper scoresheet that difference quietly outweighs the pitches themselves.
Try it on the left. One performance, four judges, and the fourth marks everyone hard. Switch the method and watch what happens to the result. You choose which one your event uses, and the raw scores are always preserved underneath, so you can show your work when a founder asks.
Scores go final, standings publish, and the official score report is already written. There is no evening spent transcribing paper into a spreadsheet while the room waits for a winner.
Turn the names off.
Normalization settles the judge who marks hard. It does nothing about the judge who recognizes the founder.
Turn on blind judging and the judging interface stops showing who an entry belongs to, so judges score the entry rather than the name on it.
You watch the whole event from one screen.
Who has scored and who has not, every judge's mark side by side, the rules the class is running under, and the current standings.
Scoring Admin
RecalculateExport Scores| Rank | Team | Judges | Round score Provisional |
Final score Provisional |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | #12Team MeridianAda Okonkwo | A. Okafor91.40R. Chen88.20D. Silva93.60 |
91.07 | 89.692 of 3 rounds in |
| 2 | #07Northwind LabsPriya Raman | A. Okafor84.10R. Chen79.50D. Silva86.30 |
83.30 | 82.102 of 3 rounds in |
| — | #19Cadence RoboticsTomas Beltre | A. Okafor88.00 2 more judges needed |
Not scored | Not scored |
| — | #04Harbor AnalyticsJen Whitfield | Nobody yet 3 more judges needed |
Not scored | Not scored |
The audience is not just watching a stage.
Attendees browse every team's profile and deck on their own phones and follow the standings as they move. Open an audience-choice ballot and they vote from the same place, with a live countdown so nobody misses the close.
You set the rules: one vote each or several, geo-fencing so only people actually at the venue can vote, and a sponsor slot on the ballot if someone is paying for it. Combine the audience result with the judges' at whatever weighting you choose, and you have an award that reflects both.
Every team that pitched today. One vote each, from anyone in the room.
You have 1 vote left on this ballot
The ballot your audience sees, on their own phones.
What organizers ask us first.
Can judges score without downloading anything?
Yes. Runs in any phone browser. Nothing to install, nothing to update. Judges open a link or scan a QR code, sign in with an SMS code, and score. There are no passwords and no app store.
Our judges are investors and they will not learn software.
They do not have to. A judge sees one pitch at a time with your criteria listed down the screen and a slider for each. The entire interface is the rubric you wrote. Most panels need no briefing beyond "here is the link".
How do we handle multiple rounds and a finals?
Run as many rounds as your format needs, with the same rubric or a different one per round. Weighting and normalization apply per round, so a semifinal score does not silently drag a finals result.
One judge scores much harder than the rest. Does that decide it?
Only if you want it to. Choose the normalization method from Raw average, High/low drop, Z-score, and Olympic-Z and a strict panel and a lenient one land on equal footing. The raw scores stay available underneath.
Several of our judges already know the founders. Can we hide the names?
Yes. Turn on blind judging and the judging interface stops showing who an entry belongs to, so judges score the entry rather than the name on it. The panel scores the pitch rather than the person, and you keep the full record underneath with names attached, so the result is still auditable line by line.
Can we run tracks, like pre-seed and seed, at the same event?
Yes. Classes are yours to define, each with its own rubric, its own judges, and its own standings, all inside one event.
Does it work for hackathons, case competitions, and demo days?
Yes. They are the same shape of problem: a panel, a weighted rubric, and a room that wants to see standings. Science fairs and abstract review run on it too.
Will the venue WiFi be a problem?
No dedicated network required. Judges, contestants and fans use their own devices and connections. No routers, no cables, no network to negotiate with a conference center.
What does it cost?
Pay-as-you-go. No subscriptions, no per-seat license, and no credit card to start. Events with 10 contestants or fewer are free. Bigger ones pay $3.49 a contestant, never more than $299 an event, plus 2.5% of anything you sell through our checkout. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Other events on the same engine.
Every judged event is a rubric, a panel and a room. See what else LiveJudge runs, or go straight to pricing and the FAQ.