Best Teams and Best Students: The Winner Selection Process

A total of 745 teams (4,039 people) took part in the 2015-2 round of the X-Culture competition: 102 teams in the “early” track and 643 teams in the “late” track.

Each report was first independently were evaluated by 4-8 experts (on average 6 evaluations per report).

Based on the expert evaluations, the reports were by their overall average evaluations.

18 teams received nearly perfect evaluations, 3 from the “early” track and 15 from the “late” track (complete list).

Please note most of the winning teams in the “early” track wrote reports for Me Late Chocolate and and in the “late” track for Coffe Vergnano because these two companies were selected by about 80% of all teams in the “early” and the “late” tracks correspondingly. So purely by chance it was very probable that these companies will be clients of the best scoring teams.

We then formed the Award Committee (Professors Patrick Bell, Karen Lynden, Marne Arthaud-Day, Sara Poggesi) who carefully reviewed one more time all the 18 finalist reports and submitted their winner recommendations.

Three teams received the same number of votes. Incidentally, all three were teams that wrote reports for Coffe Vergnano, so we went back to the company and asked them to help select the Winner. If anyone, the client company knows best which report presented the greatest value to the client. After a careful review, the client presented their recommendation for the winning team: Team 100 (late track).

This team will be getting the Winner certificates and a $1,000 cash prize from X-Culture.

Meanwhile, Forcier Consulting (one of the companies whose challenge was one of the 2015-2 challenges) established their own cash prize of $1,000 for the best Forcier report. The company reviewed all Forcier reports and carefully evaluated each one of them.

After much consideration, Forcier Consulting selected the reports from Team 109 and and Team 311 . They described the report from Team 311 as  the “best written” report, while the report from Team 109 as “the most useful” report. The company recommended that Team 109 be named the Forcier Challenge Winner (and receive the $1,000 cash prize), but that Team 311 also receives a special Finalist Certificate.

Of note, Teams 100 and 109 were composed of Undergraduate students, while Team 311 was an MBA team. Also note, none of the winning team members are students of the instructors who were on the Selection Committee. Team 311 was selected directly by Forcier, so

Of note, none of the winning teams has students of the Selection Committee members. Also, the X-Culture Admin Office had no effect on winner selection process. However, the Admin Office closely monitored the selection process and found no biases and no problems with the validity of the choices.

Best Team’s Reports (Download PDF  icon-download )

THE WINNERS OF THE 2015-2 X-CULTURE COMPETITION

Team 100 (undergraduate)

Winners of the Forcier Challenge

Team 109 (undergraduate, winner)

Team 311 (MBA, finalist with honorable mention)