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This article is for event organizers. If you are a judge, please see our Resources for Participants section.You've recruited judges for your event and assigned presentations to them, you're now ready to set up evaluation forms for submitted presentations that judges will be able to complete for each assigned presentation when they access their judging portal.
Setting up evaluation forms is a two-step process:
Create Evaluation Forms
Since this step is independent of presentation submissions and judges registering, you can do it at any time. We would recommend taking care of this after you have sent out your Presentation Submission Form and Judge Recruitment Forms, so presentation submissions and judge recruitment are both happening in the background while you set up your evaluation forms.
Under Judges > Evaluation Forms, you can create multiple custom evaluation forms which can be assigned to specific presentations. You can begin this process by clicking the Add Form button.
A new form will show up in the table, which you can edit by clicking the pencil icon next to it. The evaluation form is fully customizable, so you may create various short answer, multi-select, and Likert scale (with a range up to 100) questions for judges to use to evaluate a given presentation.
Jumping ahead for a second, the final aspect of the judging workflow on Symposium is the Share Feedback feature, which allows organizers to share judges’ responses to particular questions from the evaluation forms with presenters directly from Symposium. The reason this is pertinent at this point as you set up evaluation forms is that you need to check the checkbox for “Include judges’ responses to this field in final ‘Share Feedback’” for any questions the responses to which you’d ultimately like to share with presenters (shown in the next image). This needs to be set prior to when your event goes live and judges start submitting evaluations, as once there are responses, the form cannot be edited/customized (as is the case with the Presentation Submission Form and Judge Recruitment Forms). If you need to make changes later, you’ll have to first delete all the completed evaluations to unlock the evaluation forms, so we urge you to carefully put together your evaluation forms and double check them to ensure they’re set up as desired.
If the “Include judges’ responses to this field in final ‘Share Feedback’” option is left unchecked, judges’ responses to that question will not be shared with the presenter in the Share Feedback notification email. Only you will have access to those responses.
In addition to the evaluation forms which you can create to assign to different presentations, we also have a Final Notes Survey (shown below) which can be used to collect any summative feedback from judges after they have completed all of the Presentation evaluations. This can be used for various purposes, including to hear about their experience with the event or ask broader questions once they've evaluated all the presentations assigned to them (e.g. their favorite presentation). Unlike the evaluation forms which we just covered, the Final Notes Survey is not assigned to any specific presentation and responses to this form are for the organizer only (they cannot be shared with presenters through Symposium directly). Furthermore, you cannot create multiple versions of the Final Notes Survey – the one form will be made available to all judges across your event.
If you would like to include the Final Notes Survey as part of your event, you can set the toggle to ‘on’ and customize the form to include any questions you’d like (it’s fully customizable). The Final Notes Survey will then appear on the Judging page once the event has been launched, but it cannot be filled out by judges until after they have completed all of their assigned Presentation evaluations.
Please refer to the How Judges Judge article for more information on how evaluation forms and the Final Notes survey will appear for judges during the event.
Assign Evaluation Forms to Presentations
Once presentations have been submitted, you’ll also be able to see them in the table at the bottom of the Judging > Evaluation Forms page. As highlighted in the image below, you can select presentations using the checkbox on the left side, select an evaluation form you’ve created from the dropdown at the bottom of the table, and click “Assign Form” to pair the form with the Presentation.
NOTE: Only one evaluation form can be assigned per presentation and all judges who have been assigned to evaluate that Presentation will employ the assigned evaluation form.The evaluation form assigned can be changed as long as there are no responses yet. This can be done by selecting the Presentation using the checkbox and then selecting a new form and clicking the Assign Form button. A Presentation with a completed evaluation response cannot be reassigned to another evaluation form unless the evaluation response is first deleted (this can be done from the Judging > Evaluation Responses tab).
If you need more information on the Presentation before you assign a form, there is an eye icon next to each presentation which you can click to view the completed Presentation Submission Form. (Changes to the form cannot be made from this page, those need to be done from the Presentation Editing interface when you click the pencil icon on the presentations tab of your event management page.)
The next step in the Judging Set Up Process is Monitoring Evaluation Responses.