How we decide if an award is legit.

You shouldn’t trust a grader you can’t check. So here’s ours: the whole rubric, in the open. If you ever disagree with a grade, you’ll be able to see exactly where.

Every award is scored out of 100 across five things that actually separate a real honor from a receipt:

Selectivity carries the most weight for a reason: it’s the thing mills fake hardest. “Winner” means nothing if everyone who pays becomes one.

Some things skip the math entirely. If an award requires payment to receive it, notifies “winners” before anyone is judged, or invents its judges, it earns an Automatic F, no matter what the rest of the scorecard says.

And we grade only what’s disclosed. When a program hides too much to judge fairly, we say exactly that: Insufficient Disclosure, rather than guess. We never assert a negative we can’t prove.

The point isn’t to trust us. It’s that you could re-run the grade yourself.