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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5562
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think for a writing competition, you need a theme or focus, and maybe - for that age - some guidelines. Are you after an imaginative story, or a factual-type report of a fictional situation, or is there a setting it should take place in?

You then have something against which you can judge them subjectively, as to how well they have interpreted the brief, which gives you some freedom to say story A is, in the opinion of the judges, better at interpreting the brief than story B.

You may also want to consider whether they should be weighted, so that a story with only 95% correct spelling and grammar, but a brilliant story could win.

If you are going to introduce a subjective aspect, it is a good idea if the final subjective judging is done by the same people across all of the entries. Hopefully, this will be a manageable task.

Edit - I have just re-read and you want an objective test of storytelling, but, in reality, you cannot have such a thing. This approach should provide a consistent subjective result, which I think is the nearest you can get.

Original score: 2