Judging

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture: The role of either In-Person or Remote Initial Team Interviews is to identify candidates for each award - reducing the number of (follow-up) interviews needed to finalize the shortlisted candidates into a ranked order to determine award winners.

While some of the initial team interview information may appear be useful for the judges performing follow-up interviews, allowing the initial interviews to exert too much influence can compound any initial biases - including the unavoidable factor that different teams will likely have had their initial interviews done by different judges with different perspectives.

As such, while there is no blanket prohibition written in the Guide to Judging that directly addresses whether or not judges performing follow-up interviews should be looking at initial interview judging notes and rubrics, a better result may be achieved by allowing the fact that a team is shortlisted for an award be the starting point for a clean slate for the follow-up interview.

The notes from the initial interview could be more useful in final deliberations, adding the perspective of the initial interviewers to the final deliberations process without unduly influencing the judges performing the follow-up interviews before those judges have had an opportunity to form their own observations.