PJ writes in a comment: “I think if some schools elect to do MJP and others do not, that puts the non-prefers at a disadvantage.”
Not really. Or more specifically, not much, except in particular circumstances. But still, I’d recommend that if there’s MJP, schools should avail themselves of it.
As a rule, everyone ranks the field roughly the same. One person’s 1 is, more often than not, every other person’s 1 as well. Judges are perceived as good or bad by almost everyone identically. Which means that, for those teams who don’t rank and who thus get their opponents’ 1s, they’re getting someone they would probably consider a 1 themselves. It’s not as if people who ranked got all the good judges and people who didn’t rank got all the bad judges. The possible exception to this is when two teams that didn’t rank met, which would mean that for them every judge in the field was a 1. This could be potentially dangerous indeed, and reason enough to do rankings.
Not putting in strikes is certainly problematic in a different way. Not everybody strikes the same people, and in MJP, a strike is simply a ranking of 6 (or 9, if the tournament director chooses that option). We noticed that while most teams agree on 1s, there were a few teams that had struck the highest ranked 1s. As a matter of fact, I would say that in the blur of my memory, the highest ranked judges either got 1s or occasional 6s and not much else. I’m not quite sure why, but it may be the result of some bad past experiences teams have had with these folks on the circuit. In any case, if you are among those who would have struck the more likely 1, then you would be disadvantaged.
There are ways of attempting to work MJP to your advantage beyond just concentrating on ranking the judges you want as 1s and the judges you don’t want as 6s, but I don’t know how well they really work and, honestly, seeing how seldom we ever didn’t pair to 1-1s, they’re probably not worth the effort. As for the rest of the field, I would say rank them according to how well you know them (although one can always consult paradigms). It shouldn’t be hard to come up with a second tier of 2s, then spread the rest among the 3s, 4s and 5s knowing you’re unlikely to see any of them over the course of the weekend.
And B Taylor writes: “IMHO the optimal scenario is the run-off double-flighted with panels. Yes, I understand the time situation and the fatigue. But most of us have traveled and we are there, at the venue, for this purpose. We did not travel to see more of our hotel rooms, so another hour before a late New Haven dinner would have been fine with me.”
Well, this was the issue we confronted, and it is absolutely time and fatigue, with a different read at the end. Students had started debating at 8:00 in the morning. If we had run a double-flighted round as a simple round 7, it would have ended around 11:00 pm, and if we had had to find panels, it would have ended around 12:00. That just doesn’t seem right on face. Additionally, there were issues with the buses back to campus, not to mention that by the time folks would get back there, it would be either approaching or well after midnight, with that late New Haven dinner progressively less appetizing. (I won’t add that the hungry tab staff would have had another hour or so prepping the next round, which is true no matter when we end. As it was, JV and I did the pairing of doubles at around 1:00 at the motel, but I won’t factor in the stamina of the sterling tabfolk into the decision calculus.) We just figured enough is enough. And as I said, we ran it by both colleagues and tournament officials, and the agreement was solid. We’d be unlikely to make such a decision on our own.
I often used to speak out on the long tiresome hours run by some tournaments, where debaters and judges have gone way past a simple 360 swing on the clock dial. I’ve always felt that even if the debaters were up to it (which I doubted), the judges were way beyond it (which I didn’t doubt). Most tournaments don’t do this anymore, I’m happy to say. Poor old Pups has a history of rounds at one in the morning because of tab implosions; it’s probably in their best interest to steer as clear as possible from such wee hour rounds in the future. All I know is that we’re asking a lot of young people to work an awful lot of hours, and if this were a job, they’ve have us up on charges. I have a magic number in my head of no tournament ever going past 9:00 p.m. (if for no other reason than at my tournament, custodial fees swing into double time at the particular moment). That will usually cover enough debating and judging for most people.
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