ARC Speaker Prize Process
Revised January 2011.

Number of awards

The Education and Research Section will award $500 for best presentation by a graduate student, and allow the selection committee flexibility to have no award, if no presentation was good enough, and to have additional awards (honorable mentions for $200) if there were other very good presentations.

Winning multiple times

Students who received a $500 award in the past may not receive further monetary awards. Students whose first prize award is $200 may receive a $500 award in the future, but not a second $200 award. Students whose presentations are judged prize-worthy but are ineligible for a monetary award will receive letters of commendation from the Section.

Announcement

The main purpose of these awards is to encourage graduate student presenters to work on making quality presentations. To be effective, students need to know about their existence and our expectations. Therefore, we will:

• Publicize this process with an announcement to the relevant list serves and also feature it prominently at the conference web site.
• Encourage students to properly identify themselves.
• Make the scoring rubric available (including suggestions for effective presentations).

Criteria

We will use the following criteria:

Introduction

• Establishes the context–in particular, provides some motivation for the problem
• Is more than a bullet list of topics (though that is a good thing)
• Attendees should know enough to decide if it is worth paying attention (based on their own personal interests)

Slides

• Readable from back of room
• Limited amount of material on each one
• Is not the focus of the presentation, that is, it augments the speaker, not the other way around

Time management

• Without compromising the initial agenda, finishes with 5 minutes for questions
• Responds to questions with confidence (it is acceptable to not know the answer). This is included here because if there is no time for questions, this cannot be evaluated

Relevance

• What do we know or can do as a result of this work?
• An argument is made as to why this is good thing. Judges are not to decide if it is or is not a good thing; the key is that the speaker has made a case for it being a good thing.

Appropriate material for the ARC and time limit

• Appeals to both the casual attendee and the person who does research in this area
• Key is to avoid overly technical terminology and formulas. It would be unusual if any attendee could replicate the work after listening for 20 minutes, so the key is to convince the audience that if they read the paper they can do what the speaker has done.