The following criteria will guide all expert assessments of nominees as conducted by both our research consultants and our awards jury.

• Commitment to research
This will assess the amount of time, effort and commitment of resources towards academic research.

• Relevance of research
This will assess the relevance to and consequent impact of research findings on the various stakeholder segments and society as a whole.

• Commerciality of research
This will assess the ability to recover research expenditure and compensate for human effort through the securing both third party funding whether through commercialization of research findings or grants or any other source of direct funding of the research whether prior to or post research activity.

• Dissemination of research
This will assess the capacity and actual outcomes with regards to wide dissemination of research findings, to key stakeholders and where relevant, to the wider general public

• Commitment to teaching
This will assess an individual or an institutions commitment to teaching students with regards to time, effort and resources expended

• Quality of teaching
This will assess the quality of teaching provided with regards to knowledge imparted

• Relevance of teaching
This will assess the practical usefulness of the knowledge and concepts taught

• Teaching delivery modes
This will assess the friendliness and convenience of the modes of teaching provided eg conventional lecture hall delivery, tutorials, online learning etc.

• Recognitions for exemplary academic performance
This will assess the awards and other forms of recognition conferred on a nominee for academic performance, conduct and resultant impact. It will necessarily also take into consideration the pedigree of the institutions that have conferred such formal recognition.

• Academic pedigree
This will assess the academic pedigree of the nominee among peers and other stakeholders with a view to evaluating the nominee’s professional reputation including the reputation among employers of graduates taught by an individual or institutional nominee.

• Institutional relationships/affiliations
This will assess the formal institutional relationships that an institutional nominee is entered into with other organizations academic or otherwise ; or in the case of an individual nominee professional relationships. This included memberships of associations and other professional/institutional bodies as well as bilateral arrangements.

• Institutional governance & individual leadership qualities
This will assess the institutional governance structures and practices (for institutional nominees) and the leadership qualities of top tier academic institution executives and corporate chieftains of support service companies and other key stakeholder organizations.

These criteria will apply to both institutional and individual nominees although the considerations for the assessments for institutions may differ somewhat from the assessments of individuals under the same criterion. Each criterion carries a maximum possible score of 100 points. This makes for a maximum possible score of 1200. However, non core academic institutions and individuals – such as support service providers and bulk users of academic services – will be assessed using only the criteria that are relevant to their activities. The research consultants and the Awards Jury will, in conjunction with each other, draw up any further evaluation criteria for the various classes of non core academic nominees, although each criteria will need to be approved by the organizers. Crucially though, the exact same criteria will be used to assess every nominee for each award category and thus will have the opportunity to score the same number of points as every other nominee for a particular category.