Thank you for volunteering to be a judge at the International Business Ethics and Sustainability Case Competition. We have provided the guidelines below so that you can prepare for your judging responsibilities:
- First, please familiarize yourself with the judging forms we will provide at the competition. Also read the Competition Overview and Additional Information pages to get an overall sense of the expectations we have laid out for the teams.
- You aren’t expected to know anything about the topic you are judging. It is the team’s job to bring you up to speed.
- Please bear in mind when handling the Q&A and filling out the judging form that most students in the undergraduate division of the competition probably have had relatively few business courses. This is the first experience many of the students have had with such a comprehensive exercise. We want them to feel appropriately challenged in the Q&A, but not intimidated.
- Even though we ask students to address the legal and financial dimensions of the case, this is primarily a business ethics and sustainability competition, not a business plan or a business law competition.
- Students have been instructed to explain the ethical/sustainability issues in a simple and straightforward way in a way that is consistent with a secular, philosophical approach to ethics, and they have been advised to make it plain how these issues relate to business concerns.
- We are trying to discourage two bad habits that students have demonstrated: reading from a script and reading from power point slides instead of speaking to the “audience.” Please consider these serious errors.
- To see an example of a winning presentation that also did a good job of giving judges the necessary context for a relatively obscure (in the U.S.) topic, watch the twenty-five-minute video from Ateneo de Manilla Graduate School of Business.
- Please read the article “A Framework for Ethical Decision Making” by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.