Included with Submissions Company · monthly subscriptionSee pricing →
Solution · Submissions Company

Adjudication tools for festivals, selection committees, and BFA juries.

A clean judging workflow that keeps reviewer bias at bay, delivers a defensible final decision, and doesn't ask your volunteer adjudicators to learn an enterprise tool. Blind review by default. Rubrics you configure. Variance alerts so the consensus is actually a consensus.

CUELORA · ADJUDICATION
New Play Festival · Reviewing
● BLIND
Script #47 of 122REV 4 of 6
Craft8 / 10
Originality9 / 10
Producibility6 / 10
⚠ Variance alert · 2 reviewers disagree strongly
When to use it

Three use cases, every season.

New-play festivals

100+ scripts, 6 adjudicators, 8 weeks. Blind review, rubric-based scoring, a defensible shortlist with the variance notes your committee chair needs.

Season selection

Literary team, artistic committee, or board subcommittee evaluating next season's candidates. Consolidated rankings appear in one view; reviewers never see each other's scores until reveal.

Student selection

BFA juries, senior showcase auditions, one-act festival selections. student-record-appropriate, student-appropriate rubrics, with faculty-adjustable reveal timing.

How it works

The four-step workflow.

1

Build your rubric

Define scoring dimensions (craft, originality, producibility, fit) and weights. Save rubrics as templates for future cycles.

2

Invite reviewers

Send secure reviewer invites. Assign submissions to reviewers automatically or manually. Blind review removes author name, bio, and prior productions.

3

Collect scores

Reviewers score privately on their own timeline, with a progress tracker. Comments stay private or feed into an anonymized discussion thread.

4

Consolidate

Weighted-average rankings. Variance alerts on submissions where reviewers strongly disagreed. Exportable final decision report.

Features

Built for the way this process actually runs.

Blind review by default

Author name and bio hidden during scoring. Revealed only at the reveal phase, if your workflow requires it. Reduces affinity bias that sinks many festivals.

Configurable rubrics

Any scale, any number of dimensions, any weights. Save per-festival rubric libraries for repeatable cycles — next year's call takes five minutes to set up.

Variance alerts

Flags submissions where reviewers strongly disagreed, so your committee can discuss them before the final cut instead of letting the average decide silently.

Reviewer dashboards

Each reviewer sees their queue, progress, and deadlines. Committee chairs see the whole process. No email threads asking 'how many have you finished?'

Final decision report

Exportable PDF summarizing the full process — scoring, reviewer diversity, variance notes, and the final shortlist. Defensible, archivable, shareable.

Winner and honorable mention tiers

Rank into tiers: winner, runner-up, honorable mention, workshop invite. Tiers export as templated announcement letters the committee chair can edit.

Common questions

Answers to what people ask most.

Can non-account-holders review?

Yes — reviewer invites go out as secure magic-link emails. Reviewers never need to create an account or remember a password to complete their work.

What about demographic tracking for equity goals?

Optional demographic self-report fields can be enabled on your call. The data is visible in aggregate (to track equity outcomes) without revealing identity during scoring.

Can we override the algorithmic ranking?

Always. The consolidated ranking is a recommendation; the committee chair's final decision is manual, deliberate, and documented separately in the decision report.

Is this suitable for paid adjudicators?

Yes. Reviewer roles can be marked as paid, with hour tracking and invoice-ready exports. Useful for festivals that compensate adjudicators at a per-script rate.

Keep reading

Related to this solution.

Included with Submissions Company

Judging that holds up under scrutiny.

This solution ships with Submissions Company. No separate module, no bolt-on fee.