I completely feel you pain on this one. I attended the New England College Hackathon last weekend and was utterly disappointed. During the 12 hours we were there, they managed to only feed us once and we were bombarded by windows surveys and evangelists looking for free / cheap labor.

To make matters worse, the judges only picked winners from the local area (and made poor choices IMHO). The second place winner did NO coding at all the entire time and the first place project was 4 months old.

Something needs to be done about this. Hackathons need standards too!