Changes between Version 3 and Version 4 of SoCHints

Timestamp:

Mar 3, 2015, 1:11:00 AM (8 years ago)

Author:

Niall Douglas

Comment:

Added more detail about the reviewing process

SoCHints

@@ -30 +30 @@
  * Faculty that you work with
  * Success in programming contests
- * Religious affiliations
+ * Religious affiliations, gender, ethnicity, race or anything else which doesn't involve ability to work hard and write high quality code (note that Google exclude citizens of some countries from GSoC, but that has nothing to do with us).
 
-We rank proposals based on the feasibility of proposed work and whether or not we believe the student is capable of accomplishing that work. From experience, we have observed no correlation between these factors and the ability to complete a project. We primarily gauge capability through our interactions with students on and off the mailing list.
+We rank proposals based on the feasibility of proposed work and whether or not we believe the student is capable of accomplishing that work. From experience, we have observed a strong correlation between students who come early and self initiate contact with potential mentors and success. We suggest you be one of those, not a student who submits an application an hour before the deadline who we've never seen before. Indeed, as of 2015 we have taken measures to downrank such late applications, see below.
 
-= Reviewing =
+= How the student proposal reviewing process works =
 
-Reviewing is basically done in two rounds. First the mentors score each of the proposals, then we vote on which of the highest scored proposals will be funded based on the number of slots Google awards Boost. The specific process may vary from year to year, but you definitely need to write a good proposal and usually need to be active on the mailing list to make it to the 2nd round.
+Almost as soon as student applications begin, the Boost community including potential mentors begin to start ranking proposals. We have noticed that early submitted proposals tend to do better than later submitted proposals. Each community member will assign a score between 1 and 5 to each proposal, and may ask you questions. You should try to answer those promptly.
 
-Acquiring funding to work on a Boost project is very competitive. We can typically only fund 10% (or less) of the proposals that we receive, and we usually receive a lot of proposals. Following these guidelines will substantially increase the likelihood that you will make it into the voting round.
+Boost community members will tag proposals they would like to mentor with their name. You the student doesn't see this part until the end. When student applications close, we assign each proposal into one of two categories:
+
+A: The student has demonstrated their ability to write in C++.
+
+B: The student has not demonstrated their ability to write in C++.
+
+We take the highest scored proposals from Category A ''which have a mentor willing to mentor them'' and recommend those to Google, in order of scoring. Sometimes a mentor is attached to more than one proposal, in this case the highest ranked proposal is recommended to Google and the others are not as we try to avoid more than one mentor per student. After all the proposals from Category A have been recommended to Google, we then recommend those from Category B which have a mentor willing to mentor them. This is what we mean by "preferentially ranked" - no matter how good the written application, a student without evidence of ability to program is the least likely to be selected no matter what.
+
+Google then review our list of recommendations, usually removing some students from our top picks, and return back to us how many students they will fund for Boost this year. We try to reassign mentors as appropriate to fit the loss of higher ranked students and however many slots Google gave us. We may try begging Google for more slots sometimes depending on the calibre of applicant we would lose otherwise. A few rounds between us and Google then occur, eventually settling on a ranking, and those students get to do a Boost GSoC that year.