Courses can fulfill many educational roles:
- Introducing a core graphics area, suitable for someone with little background in that area. These can cover various topics, ranging from introductory to advanced. The jury evaluates these based on if they believe the course will guide an attendee through the material in a sensible way.
- Introducing a topic related to graphics but not considered "core" graphics. The jury evaluates these courses based on the expected benefit of the knowledge to a typical SIGGRAPH attendee.
- Consolidating a new and emerging research trend. The jury evaluates these courses based on their potential to facilitate knowledge transfer for practical applications and guide new researchers in the area.
Well-attended, strong courses may be re-submitted in subsequent years. Recently taught courses must provide justification for why the course should be repeated. If you are proposing revisiting an older course, you should explain why the material should be revisited, and what new advances will be covered. Introductory courses have the potential to be repeated more frequently than advanced ones, as the potential audience is larger.
Some reasons courses are rejected:
- Example notes or slides fail to communicate key ideas clearly and informatively.
- Materials narrowly cover an area, without sufficient justification. A course should provide a comprehensive overview, and not just focus (for instance) on the presenter’s own techniques or methods used in a particular company.
- Previous courses have sufficiently covered the area, or the jury feels the topic is too narrow to attract sufficient attendance at SIGGRAPH.
- Too many high-quality courses were submitted, and the jury could only select a subset.
Jurors are asked to evaluate your submission using four criteria: Concept, Novelty, Interest, and Quality. The final submission score is based on a combination of these factors. For example, a submission that is high quality, has broad appeal, and contains something new is likely to be accepted, while a submission that is incremental, of interest to only a small number of people, and poorly written will probably be rejected.
Concept
How exceptional are the ideas, problems, solutions, aesthetics, etc. presented in this submission? How coherently does the submission convey its overall concept? Is the concept similar to existing ones, or does it stand out? This criterion is particularly applicable to submissions that put together existing technologies into a single course proposal (for example, demos, animations, art pieces). Submissions of this type, where the individual technologies are not necessarily new but their combination is, are evaluated on both the final product and how well-proposed technologies integrate to meet the desired goals. Many submissions in this area are rejected because they do what existing systems do, and they do not demonstrate that the proposed approach will produce a superior course.
Novelty
How new and fresh is this work? Is it a new, ground-breaking approach to an old problem, or is it an existing approach with a slightly new twist? You must demonstrate to the jury that your course is sufficiently different from other approaches to the topic.
Interest
Will conference attendees want to attend this course? Will it inspire them? Does it appeal to a broad audience? This is partly a measure of how broad the potential audience is and partly a measure of the overall clarity and novelty of the proposal.
Quality, Craft, and Completeness
This is a measure of the course proposal's quality of expression, clarity of thinking, and how clearly and completely it explains the course and its intentions.
