Competition Format

Cases for the Templeton Business Ethics Case Competition are written or acquired by the competition directors. The case for a particular annual competition is emailed to the two student team members and the faculty advisor at each participating institution. For the 2019 competition, the case will be emailed on January 24, 2019. The case is usually two to three pages long and involves a contemporary business issue that presents financial, legal, and ethical issues for decision makers. Approximately two weeks after receipt of the case, teams must prepare and submit both an executive summary and a PowerPoint slide deck to be used in their oral presentation. These materials are due on Thursday, February 14, 2019.

The competition begins with an opening dinner on Thursday evening. The dinner is held on the Stetson University campus and provides an opportunity for visiting teams and faculty advisors to meet one another and the Stetson directors of the event. There will be a keynote speaker at the dinner and an informational segment with time for questions from participants.

Based on an evaluation of the executive summary and PowerPoint, the competition directors will seed teams into brackets. Bracket assignments will be announced at the Thursday evening dinner. In the first round, which occurs on Friday morning, teams will make a 20-minute oral presentation to a panel of judges. The oral presentation will be followed by a five-minute period for questions from the judges. These impromptu questions may be answered by either or both team members and are for the purpose of allowing the judges to check facts and clarify statements. They are not designed to examine the team’s knowledge of the subject.

Early Friday afternoon, teams will remain in their same bracket and return to the same presentation room to answer content-oriented questions from the same panel of judges that evaluated the team’s oral presentation. Each bracketed team will receive the same questions. The question/answer session is approximately 10 minutes in length, and team members must alternate in providing responses to the judges’ questions. There will be five questions with a maximum of two minutes per answer.

Based on performances in the first and second rounds, the judges for each bracket will declare a bracket winner. After this announcement, the bracket winners will have only five minutes to prepare for their final eight-minute oral presentation to the entire body of judges in a plenary session attended by all conference attendees, members of the Stetson University community and the public. First, second, third and fourth place prize winners will be announced at the closing ceremony on Friday afternoon.