2027 Ohio Competitions and Contests

• Students must be paid Active-level student members of Educators Rising by February 1st of the year in which they are competing. Check or credit card payment must be received in the National Office by February 15th to be considered an Active-level member.

• Students may only compete in one competitive event.

• For contests: Teacher leaders may enter up to two entries (individual or dual) per school in each event per division.

  • Dual means two students participating.

  • For dual entries consisting of students of varying grade levels, the entry will be placed in the division for the grade level of the most senior member.

• For competitions: Teacher leaders may enter up to two entries per school in each individual event per division and one team for team events per division. Competitions/contests that are marked as individual or dual will be considered individual events for this purpose.

  • All team events must have at least two students (and no more than four) per school to qualify.

  • For teams consisting of students of varying grade levels, the team will be placed in the division for the grade level of the most senior member.

• The breakdown of grades noted below indicates levels for competition entries. Not all competitions are open to all divisions.

  • Middle School — Grades 7, 8

  • High School Junior Varsity— Grades 9, 10

  • High School Varsity level — Grades 11, 12

  • Spanish Speaking

• Registering in the incorrect division will result in disqualification.

• Teams of students from varying grade levels will be placed in the division for the grade level of the most senior member.

All submitted materials must reflect original work from the 2026-2027 school year. Material that may have been created or submitted in previous years is ineligible.

Only one application can be submitted for team competitions which lists all team members in all places indicated on the application form.

Each competition guideline will identify the materials are required for submission before the competition. Failure to submit the required materials by the submission deadline will result in disqualification. All submitted materials must be in their final form.

All video files submitted in advance must be uploaded to YouTube and be linked to the application form. Videos will not be accepted by mail. All videos and presentations must be brought to the conference on a USB drive and files must be accessible without internet access. If students plan to use their own devices for presentation, students must be able to connect their device via HDMI to an external projector without assistance.

Spectators are only permitted in the competitions marked “Open to Spectators.” This includes parents, chaperones, teacher leaders, and other attendees. Spectators may not coach or offer any verbal or nonverbal assistance to a contestant during that contestant’s assigned time slot with the judges. A breach of this guideline may result in the disqualification of the contestant.

Teacher Leaders, Chaperones, and Parents are prohibited from approaching judges or state officers to discuss scoring or feedback or awards. All questions or concerns should be brought to the attention of the State Coordinator.

• Scoring is based on the posted individual competition rubric.

• Final scores will be based on a scaled score. Scaled scores are calculated using several methods, including judges tie breakers and room normalizations.

• Judges will break ties in all competitive events.

• To accommodate a large number of competitors, we use multiple rooms, each with its own set of judges. We employ a well-established mathematical method to normalize scores to ensure fairness across these rooms. This method helps balance judge subjectivity and ensures all competitors have a fair shot, regardless of their assigned room.

  • In each competitive event, each competitor gets an average score from the judges which is averaged with the partner judge. If there is a deviation of more than one standard deviation between rooms, the two rooms are normed against one another to that deviation. The final scores used for ranking are the normalized scores (also known as scaled scores).

  • Perfect scores will be excluded from the normalization process when scoring is normalized. If more than one student in the same division in the same competition receives a perfect score, a second set of judges will review the presentations for those students to make a final decision.

• In competition submissions, all ideas, text, images, and sound from other sources used for the competition must be cited.

• Competitors are strongly discouraged from using copyrighted material in their competition entries. If copyrighted material is used, written permission must be obtained to display and present media-related materials at the Educators Rising State Conference and post-media related materials on the Educators Rising website. All permissions obtained to use copyrighted material must be included with the entry submission. (Note: This requirement applies to music used in videos, graphics taken from the internet, and other media-related materials. It does not apply to artifacts collected for a project.)

• Plagiarism is strictly prohibited in all documents submitted. Judges can disqualify students from competing if they determined that any part of their documents have been plagiarized.
  

• Slacks similar to Dockers and other makers of cotton or synthetic material pants, wool pants, flannel pants, dressy capris, nice-looking dress synthetic pants and jeans without holes are good examples.

• Inappropriate slacks or pants would include jeans with holes, sweatpants, exercise pants, Bermuda shorts, short shorts, shorts, bib overalls, leggings, and any spandex or other form-fitting pants that people wear for biking.

• Good examples would be casual dresses, skirts, and skirts that are split at or below the knee. The length of the dress and skirt should be comfortable for sitting in public.

• Mini skirts, skorts, sundresses, and spaghetti-strap dresses would not be appropriate professional attire.

• Casual shirts, dress shirts, sweaters, tops, and polo shirts are great examples of what to wear.

• Attire that would not look professional would include tank tops; midriff tops; shirts with political messaging and/or potentially offensive terms, logos, pictures, cartoons, or slogans; halter tops; tops with bare shoulders; sweatshirts; and t-shirts unless worn under another blouse, shirt, jacket, or dress.