The 3NR

It’s a Wednesday afternoon. The last tournament of the year is over. Things seem to be winding down, drawing to a close, giving us that freedom we always craved while we spent late nights cutting cards—yet, we come back. For some, inexplicable reason, we come back—we read the 3NR, we write our judging philosophies (and how excited we are, about the fact that we can do that now), we fill out surveys about our thoughts on the season, and we generally keep thinking about debate, although everything has now been said and done for the entire year. Why do we come back?

Is it because debate has ultimately shaped who we are, as people? Is it because we are perpetually drawn to the rush of competition, in an oddly addictive sort of sense, like moths to lamps? Or is it just because over the past four years, we’ve come to feel like we are part of a community, and that is a community that we can never truly walk away from?

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At post-season tournaments, the frequency with which teams break new affirmatives increases exponentially. Unfortunately, this can be a recipe for pre-round misunderstandings and even confrontations—especially when combined with the heightened level of stress that generally accompanies debates at these tournaments. Like baseball, debate is full of unwritten rules—norms that the community generally agrees upon but which are not codified or universally understood. When an individual feels that a peer has violated one of these rules, they are often deeply offended. But what are the unwritten rules regarding disclosure of new affirmatives? And perhaps as importantly, what should they be? This post is an invitation for coaches and debaters to discuss “new aff” norms in advance of this year’s post-season tournaments. Some starting points for the discussion—including hypothetical scenarios—are below the fold.

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This year’s National Debate Tournament will be hosted later this month by the University of California-Berkeley. Seventy-eight teams from forty-four colleges and universities have qualified to be part of the field either through district qualifying tournaments or through the first- and second-round bid process. Considered by most to be the pinnacle of interscholastic policy debate, the NDT brings together the most successful debaters in the country for an extended weekend of intense competition in order to crown the national championship team.

For high school debaters with aspirations of competing in college, qualifying for the NDT is a frequent goal. But is it realistic? The popular perception is that debaters who qualify for the NDT are largely products of strong high school debate programs and expensive summer institutes that are afforded the opportunity to compete regularly at national circuit tournaments. But is that really the case?

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Established in 2006, The David P. Baker Award for Season Long Excellence is presented at the National Debate Coaches’ Association Championship to the high school policy debate team with the highest point total using the tournament’s qualification system.

Modeled to some extent after college debate’s Copeland Award, the Baker is calculated based on a mathematical formula rather than on a poll of coaches or voters. This basic statistical approach to evaluating a debate team’s performance over the course of a season has been criticized by some participants and coaches who have advanced several critiques of the formula.

This article is an attempt to first explain the way that the Baker Award is calculated and then to highlight the major complaints that have been levied against it.

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Contention One: Inherency

In the status quo, the vast majority of high school policy debate judges (at least those at “national circuit” tournaments) do not provide written comments on their ballots. A very small subset of judges—approximately ten percent based on an unscientific assessment of the publicly-posted ballots from the St. Mark’s and Blake tournaments—provide any written content at all. Of that subset, an even smaller group of judges provides “substantial” written commentary (defined as more than a short, one or two sentence reason for decision). Some tournaments have responded to this norm by eliminating ballots entirely—The Glenbrooks, for example, only provides small judge cards that are not copied or scanned for the competitors.

Thus The Plan:

High school policy debate judges should provide written comments on their ballots. This commentary should supplement—not replace—post-round oral disclosure and discussion of the debate.

Contention Two: The Advantage

The plan is superior to the status quo for all three relevant constituencies: debaters, coaches, and judges.

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[T]o say that representations matter—insofar as [they] determine/influence policy outcomes—says little or nothing about which justifications should be used for policymaking. The representations presented by the 1AC that are justifications for action, instead of outcomes of the plan are neither mandatory nor inevitable outcomes of voting Aff.

Thus, the judge, at the end of the debate, should be able to choose (for themselves) why to vote Aff or Neg. Logically, one can choose the best arguments from the set of available reasons presented in the debate. Not every 1AC justification needs to be part of the final “package” of voting Aff. If one or more representations for voting for the plan is undesirable, they should not be used. If, at the end of the debate, positive/beneficial justifications for acting remain, the plan is desirable and the Aff should win.

With that, University of Georgia Debate Coach Casey Harrigan has levied a fundamental challenge to the theoretical viability of representational critique as currently conceptualized in academic policy debate. This article will defend Harrigan’s “judge choice” theory against the attacks of its critics and thereby contribute to the developing theoretical literature about representational critique.

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Paul Strait of the University of Southern California recently authored an interesting post on the CEDA forum about the time it takes judges to make their decisions. As discussed in a previous column, this is a hot topic in the college community because the average length of decisions at that level is forcing tournaments to consider reductions in the number of preliminary rounds offered in order to prevent marathon tournament schedules. Paul’s contention is that we need to foreground consideration of judging methodologies in order to determine what contributes to lengthy decisions and what effect this has on the quality of decisions.

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There is an ongoing discussion occurring in the college debate community about the length of tournaments and the need to balance competitive opportunities with a humane schedule. Many of the major college tournaments have moved to seven or even six rounds of preliminary competition in order to accommodate the substantially longer length of current debate rounds without forcing students and coaches/judges to endure a marathon schedule.

While this issue is not nearly as salient at the high school level, both debaters and judges could do substantially more to make the average day at a debate tournament more livable.

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First I want to say that Tim Mahoney, Jason Peterson and everyone at St. Mark’s did an incredible job running this tournament.   The tournament did not run late, everyone had ample time for pre round prep and the tournament ran incredibly smooth.  If you have not been to St. Mark’s before you should consider adding it to your schedule of tournaments.

Having spent a little bit of time reviewing the packet and ballots (both available on Joyoftournaments.com for everyone to see) I think that overall the implementation of the 100 point system was a success.

St. Mark’s provided a scale to be used for assigning points.   The scale translated into the following.  Take the points you would have given a debater on the 30 point scale, subtract that number by 20 and multiply that result by 10.  So if I had wanted to give someone a 27,  27-20 = 7.  7 x 10 = 70.  Now obviously because the scale is larger you get to play around and say assign a 71 72, 73 etc.  The ballot also requested that you not give two debaters in the room the same exact speaker points; the goal of this was that in every single debate you should be able to differentiate in order who debated the best.

Looking at the ballots and the packet I got a good sense that this system is clearly superior to the current system of .5 increments.  The concern of widespread variance was solved for by the scale provided by the tournament.   You were more able to get a grasp of who debated better in any given debate (by forcing each debater to get separate points)  and you were able to better see the differences amongst a medium 27.5 debater and high 28.5 debater in a debate.

My biggest criticism of the system might be something that is more cosmetic then anything but speaks to relative point inflation.  The top 7 debaters at St. Marks averaged above a 90 (or over 29 in the 30 point system) in their 6 debates( looking at total points not even the high /low).  While I think that all of those top 7 speakers deserved their speaker awards (heck one of them was one of my kids) I’ve become concerned that there might be a psychological barrier associated with the 90 point mark.  I’m not sure if people feel comfortable having a high 28.5 be less than a 90 total points.  This in turn could cause points to creep back up into the 85-100 scale and lead us back to the same broken point system we currently use.  Because this is obviously the first high school tournament this is not a reason to dismiss this system and on balance just some food for thought about the system.

The way I see it we have 3 options

1.)    Stay with the current .5 increment 30 point system- to me this is the worst of the 3 options, this system is broken and has been for a while.  I suspect it will take tournaments a while to adjust I’m glad St. Mark’s started this move in HS.

2.)    Keep this point scale (the -20 x 7) at most major hs tournaments and hope it adjusts itself to normal ( I suspect it might)

3.)    Go to a decimal point system where you have 28.1, 28.2, 28.3.   While it doesn’t have the shock factor of seeing a 93 and 73 given out in the same debate it is functionally the same and might prevent 29.2 from being the average points of the top speaker at a tournament

If someone has an in depth position either way on the system and how it worked at St. Marks e-mail me and we’ll consider making it a feature post.  If you all liked / disliked it send me an email with a reason why and I’ll compile those into a long post to not totally clutter the comment section on the right.

Another post from Stephen about the card at hand

Let’s apply the Chaudoin method to the Carroll evidence that has been heralded as the bringer of death for Consult:

Before doing that, let’s observe that this “piece of evidence” fails the old debate test of “claim + warrant = argument.”  I feel like a novice saying this, but, there’s no warrant in that card.  Also note that this is really unfair to Jamie because we’re talking about a footnote, not his actual argument.  I blame the author of the post for this silliness in the first place.

1)      Do the predictions logically flow from the assumptions:

No.

This footnote seems to conflate “allowing a veto” with “subservience of foreign policy to the whims of other countries.”  It also seems to ignore the potential for the US to decide when to consult and when not to consult.

2)      Are real world data consistent with these predictions?

No.

This footnote doesn’t mention any, so this is really a nonstarter anyways, but we could easily think of some pretty prominent examples where allowing other countries to veto foreign policy would have saved us some serious mockery.  Had the US actually consulted the UN on Iraq II, Jon Stewart would be out of a job.

3)      What are some more rigorous academic arguments related to the subject? (Khalilzad and a Friedman rant/op ed don’t count).

-          We might check out articles by Chapman and Reiter, or Chapman alone that are about the rally round the flag effect and international effects of consultation.  We might develop a better notion of “cooperation” by reading Carrubba’s “Courts and Compliance in International Institutions” etc.  Ikenberry’s “After Victory” is about hegemons “smoothing” their power trends by binding themselves to particular institutions.

Here’s another quick way to apply the Chaudoin method.  Ask: “Does the piece of ‘evidence’ I’m reading have all the depth of a Fox News transcript or does it actually make an argument?”