Making Your Decision
The most important activity that SIFE teams engage in is teaching others the principles of market economics, success skills, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, environmental sustainability and business ethics. SIFE teams receive very specific training and instruction to focus their efforts towards the six criteria outlined above, which have been determined by the SIFE Board of Directors, plus an additional criterion that focuses on overall team & program sustainability. Although you may personally believe there are other worthwhile activities that SIFE teams should engage in, or actually hear about other activities from the teams that present to you, please base your judging decisions on how well each team’s educational programs fulfilled the criteria outlined above.
Remember that within the framework of these teaching concepts, teams have complete discretion to choose the audiences they work with. You may hear examples of many different groups that the SIFE teams have targeted their programs towards, such as school children in an affluent suburb, small business owners, villagers in a rural area, individuals on welfare, other university students, etc. Although some of the audiences that teams will target may appear to have more need than others, you should not automatically give preference to these teams but rather, base your judging decisions on which teams were able to demonstrate having had the most impact on the audiences they chose to work with.
In addition to their teaching efforts, the only other activities that you should consider as part of your decision-making process are those that the team initiated to ensure the long-term sustainability of their program. This would include activities such as recruiting students, assembling a Business Advisory Board, using the mass media, securing the financial contributions necessary to support their teaching initiatives, etc. However, SIFE is not a competition about which team recruited the most students, raised the most money, received the most media coverage, etc. These activities are only relevant to the degree that they enhanced the team’s ability to
fulfil their primary mission of teaching.
SIFE teams put a tremendous amount of time and energy into the creation of their written annual report and audio/visual presentation. You will likely see very talented students, who are dynamic speakers and that have employed the use of sophisticated technology in their presentation. Teams are certainly encouraged to be as creative as possible with their presentation, and we would ask that you not penalize any teams for being too “flashy”. However, please do your best to look past the quality of the teams’ presentations and base your evaluation on a serious review of the content of the teams’ educational programs. Once you have come to a decision, we ask you to please refrain from discussing your evaluations with the other judges.
As a SIFE judge, please know that the comments on the Individual Team Evaluation Sheets are the only formal feedback teams receive from judges during the competitive process. SIFE strongly encourages you to take the time to give specific feedback on their current programs and explain how to improve and build for the future.