Student 15-minute Paper Competition Information

Evaluation and Judging

Students who present in the Student 15-minute Paper Competition will be evaluated in two areas:

• Scientific Content (50%)
  • Talk Content
    • Introduction & background with pertinent literature cited (10 points)
    • Objectives clearly stated & concise (10 points)
    • Materials & methods (study design) clear & concise (10 points)
    • Results & discussion clear, concise, & accurate (10 points)
    • Significance of results to field of study (10 points)
• Presentations (50%)
  • Organization
    • Logical order, minimum redundancy (5 points)
    • Smooth transitions between presentation sections (5 points)
  • Slides
    • Legible with large fonts, color contrast, no conflicting backgrounds (10 points)
    • Text with no grammatical errors; not excessively wordy (5 points)
  • Delivery
    • Clear & audible speech (10 points)
    • Eye contact with audience (5 points)
    • Effective use of figures and/or tables (5 points)
    • Effective use of time (5 points)

The letter scale used is similar to those of classroom instructors or granting agencies: E = excellent or “A”, VG = very good or “B”, G = good or “C”, F = Fair or “D”, and NI – needs improvement or “F”. Numerical scores are proportioned accordingly. Each paper is judged independently by three judges.

In the event of a tie, the Student Competition Co-Chairs will use the submitted abstract as a tie-breaker. Abstracts will be judged according to how informative and well written it is and how well is correlates with the presentation..

A sample Student 15-minute Paper Competition Scorecard is available for reference.

Sessions

Students compete only against the students in their session and not against other students in the same topic area who were assigned to other sessions. The size of each session is dependent upon the initial number of papers submitted to each topic area.

Each presentation is allotted a total time of 15 minutes – 12 minutes for the presentation and 3 minutes to address questions from the audience. Moderators are instructed to enforce the time limit and the moderator will stop a presenter who exceeds the time limit of 15 total minutes. Please time your presentation accordingly to avoid this embarrassing situation.

Suggestions for Presenters

Visual aids can significantly enhance or severely diminish the effectiveness of your presentation.  The following guidelines are general considerations:

• Avoid red-green combinations.  Approximately 10% of men and 0.4% of women have some form of red-green color-blindness.  If in doubt, print the figure or slide on a black and white printer.  This visual is what a severe red-green deficient viewer will see.  (Remember, this person may be a judge.)
• Enhance contrast between background, text, and figures, but do not use excessive contrasts.  Avoid dark-colored text and figures on dark-colored backgrounds and light-colored text and figures on light-colored backgrounds.  Avoid bright contrasts that are figuratively or literally painful to view.
• Use large and legible text fonts.  Text should be read easily from at least 10 meters away (minimum 18 point font, Arial).  Use easy to read, san serif fonts like Arial.  Do not crowd slides with text.
• Simplify graphs and tables or consider alternative visuals.  Complex graphs and tables filled with an excess of numbers are difficult to read and will detract from an explanation of results.