The Student Contest on Software Engineering (SCORE), organized for the first time in conjunction with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2009, attracted 50 student teams from around the world, produced an impressive and varied set of projects, and earned appreciative comments from participants and even from teams who chose not to submit their results to the competition. It was a remarkable success, but not without problems and setbacks. In this article we explain the objectives, constraints, and design philosophy of SCORE, particularly as they distinguish it from the tradition of computer science contests focused more narrowly on programming. We also recount key approaches taken to design and management of this novel kind of contest, the difficulties we met (some still outstanding), and the lessons learned.