While students may submit one paper and one poster or infographic to the program, only one submission may be in the student competition. View eligibility, judging criteria, and other helpful information below.
Eligibility
Students are eligible for the competition for 12 months after the month of graduation, with current ESA student or student transition membership.
While all presenters may submit one oral and one poster or infographic to the Annual Meeting program, students may only submit one presentation to the student competition.
Evaluation & Judging
NEW FOR 2023: The rubric has been amended to be inclusive of education, outreach, and teaching presentations. The Student Competition Co-Chairs will do their best to group presentations on these subjects into sessions together, although a perfect fit is not always possible.
Students who present their 10-minute paper (10-min) at the Annual Meeting will be evaluated in the following areas:
Scientific Content (55%)
- Title concise, informative, and relevant for presentation content; judge title given at start of presentation (5 points)
- Introduction and background with pertinent literature cited (10 points)
- Objectives or hypotheses clearly stated and concise / Objectives of course design or teaching program clearly stated and concise with learning gaps and target audience(s) identified (10 points)
- Materials and methods (study design) clear, concise, and appropriate to problem / Course or program design development and relevant evaluation metrics clear, concise, and appropriate for the learning gaps and audience(s) (10 points)
- Interpretation of results and analysis clear, concise, and accurate and addresses needs of target audience (10 points)
- Significance of results to field of study or teaching community and targeted audience clearly discussed(10 points)
Presentation (45%)
- Logical order; minimum redundancy (5 points)
- Smooth transitions between presentation slides and sections, including the speaker introducing themselves to the audience (5 points)
- Slides use universal design principles with appropriate fonts, font sizes, high contrast images (for example, avoiding color schemes that are hard to distinguish for colorblind participants like red/green) (5 points)
- Slides have no grammatical errors and are not excessively wordy (5 points)
- Effective use & description of visuals (i.e. photos, diagrams, figures, and tables); do they support the presentation narrative? (15 points)
- Appropriate volume (uses microphone if available) & speed of speech; clear communication; please note, score should not be dependent on audio equipment (5 points)
- Effective use of time; 10-12 minutes with appropriate balance across presentation sections, with time to field audience questions effectively (5 points)
Each paper is judged independently by three judges. In the event of a tie, the Student Competition Co-Chairs will use the abstract to determine the winner.
A Sample 10-min Paper Evaluation Form is available for reference.
Sessions
Students compete only against the students in their session and not against other students in the same topic area but who were assigned to other sessions. The size of each session is dependent upon the initial number of papers submitted to a specific topic area. Each presentation is allotted a total of 12 minutes; 10 for the presentation and 2 for questions.
NEW FOR 2023: The rubric has been amended to be inclusive of education, outreach, and teaching presentations. The Student Competition Co-Chairs will do their best to group presentations on these subjects into sessions together, although a perfect fit is not always possible.