Big Jake is going MJP and case disclosure this year. Let's take the former first, which we'll also be doing at Yale. Once upon a time I was thoroughly against Mutual Judge Preference. Longtime members of the VCA might recall this. For reasons that elude me, the debate community, on hearing about my feelings on this subject, did not immediately suppress all further implementations of MJP at tournaments. My influence just wasn't what I thought it was.
Opinions on judge assignment strategies range widely. There is a school of thought that any LDer ought to be able to convince anyone of their position, and thus anyone who can breathe and speak English has met the necessary requirements for judging. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the school of thought that LD is a specialized business requiring specialized adjudicators. Opinions of judge assignment strategies are informed by which end of the spectrum one happens to be on. For that matter, opinions of LD are informed by that same position. I’ll go even further and say that some people have opinions of what LD ought to be, and then decide all practical matters based on that personal vision.
And the thing is, with the variety of regions, the levels of novice through varsity, and the existence of an elite $ircuit, everyone is equally right or wrong.
My personal learning experience regarding MJP began, as I say, agin’ it. I perceived it as a way for the field to manipulate the judging to their own benefit. But as I listened to the arguments of folks who were not agin’ it, I began to wonder.
In a tab room one can, if one is so inclined, randomly assign all the judges. Forget about brackets, forget about analyzing which judges are for some reason or other better than other judges, just let the chips fall where they may. This is not some bizarre practice known only in jungles of the Sahara: I do it every couple of weeks at MHL and CFL events. At these tournaments, we have anywhere from 20 to 100 novices, say, or JVers; the judges are all upperclassfolk or parents we are training at the event (whom we carefully hand-hold and lecture and monitor); there are 3 or 4 rounds. Attempting to rank judges would be a ridiculous exercise. We spend most of our time trying to find the judges people told us where there but who seem to have disappeared into the ether. These events are an exercise in creating a debate factory that, with any luck, after a year or two produces a product known as a debater.
At invitationals, for years we operated under a system of ranking the judges according to our own lights. That is, the tab room, with two or three coaches, would agree that So-and-So is an A, Whosits is a B, and Whatshername is a C. Then we would assign the highest rated judges to the most crucial rounds, where a loss put someone out of the running for elims. At many if not most of these tournaments, the number of judges was just about the number needed to get the job done, so even the Cs judged most rounds, and no one did a hell of a lot of sitting around in the lounge scarfing down the champagne and oysters.
My personal response to MJP was community rankings, which I certainly didn’t invent but which I pushed at my own and other tournaments. With community rankings, everyone is still ranked A, B, or C, but by the attendees at the tournament and not the tab room. The results have been mostly the same, but the buy-in was, I think, a good thing. Probably the biggest difference in tab ranking and community ranking is that people who debated more than a couple of years ago but haven’t judged much are forgotten by the field as a whole but not by the tab room, so we would more highly rank someone who went to TOC 4 years ago than you would if you didn’t know that person as anyone other than an alum from somewhere. This always happens at Bump, where I bring back some great but unknown debaters who get ranked less than they deserve; the field doesn’t know what it’s missing.
Community rankings work fine until, as Bietz has pointed out, you’re not a member of the community. So when he would go to Yale, he would be hard-pressed to do much other than highly rank the handful of admittedly regional judges that he knew, leaving the rest to chance. That’s the flaw of community ranking: it only works when there’s a community. The field has to know the pool pretty well, which is usually true at non-$ircuit events without a national draw. The more national your draw gets, the less successful community rankings seem to be. If nothing else, you’re at the mercy of a region’s opinion of things, and if that region is different from your region, you might not be happy with the results. Some tournaments, like Yale, are in that mixed bag of being not $ircuit but not local. Others, like Glenbrooks or Emory, are squarely in the $ircuit category.
It is that national draw factor that matters when it comes to MJP. At the point where judges are from everywhere under the sun, the idea that you can select the ones you know best as potential adjudicators does not equate with selecting the ones who will let you win. You may know, say, 20 judges in the pool; if you’re lucky, 3 of them always pick you up, and on any given day, even those 3 can drop you like the proverbial stone. Still, you at least know what you're getting, and have some idea of what styles might work. (Note to judges: If you say on your paradigm you never pick up theory, please don’t write as your RFD, “I went with the theory argument.”) So does your opponent, since tab will be matching prefs, your 1 and your opponent’s 1. And sometimes it’s your 3 and your opponent’s 3, and you're still on equal ground. If LD is going to have national events, I would say, MJP at those events becomes a given. It gives you your best chance to do well. And more to the point, it gives the entire field its best chance to do well. And the worst-case scenario, teams that don’t pref? Well, they’re getting the rankings of their opponents, so short of having a judge they would have struck, they will at least get judges their opponents think highly of. Going back to the community ranking model, the communities as a whole tend to think alike. The odds are, short of a total style conflict, your 1 is my 1. So the downside isn’t that down.
So what’s the point? Apply the right method of judge pool management to your tournament. Feel free to experiment; you can always change it next year. But as a rule of thumb, in a jumble of young, inexperienced debaters, random is fine. In a clearly defined community (like the northeast), community rankings are probably a good idea. If you have a national draw, your field is probably going to be happiest with MJP. Should you bow to the wishes of your field? Duh.
But what about those folks who believe any LDer should be able to pick up any ballot from any judge? Well, presumably there are tournaments for them to go to, local events that are extensions of what we do with our MHLs. I’m all in favor of it, because I love parent judging and I’m happy that Pfffft now exists so that it won’t, for a while, go out of existence. Most of the benefits of LD are available at every level, and programs can pick the tournaments they want to go to, and even start leagues that offer what they want if those events are not already out there. (That is not just whistling Dixie, because we’ve done it ourselves, down to the institution of our own standard novice resolution.) But on the other hand, while I might be quite happy with, say, Aaron Timmons, Jon Cruz and Cherian Koshy judging a final round of first-time novices at some local barbecue—in fact, I would love that to death—I would not feel comfortable if the final round of TOC was judged by three people whose first name is Mr. or Mrs., i.e., inexperienced parent judges. The right tool for the job, in other words.
We have enough right tools at this point to choose wisely.
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