To elaborate on what I was saying earlier in the week about judge adaptation, yes, you can get 3s and 4s and 5s in MJP. People seem to think that ranking anyone less than a 2 means that they won’t be judged by them, that giving a judge a low preference means that, effectively, they’ve limited the pool to about 25% of the available judges.
That is a really, really bad thought.
There is a question that arose from a discussion about a break round, that some people would rather be on the wrong side of, say, a 1-2 rather than get a 3-3 or less. The assumption here is, I guess, if they are not getting mutuality, they’re getting a “better” judge, or at least a better judge according to their lights. In fact, at one tournament (I can’t recall which), when we were first dipping our toes into these waters, we allowed coaches to indicate in advance if such was their preference. (Along these lines, at the NDCA in Scranton, where we simply couldn’t accommodate mutuality, we tracked imbalances in aid of, by the end of the prelims, evening them out.) But with the passage of time, I’ve come to believe that this is a bad procedure. First of all, there’s the simple question of either you’re running a tournament with MJP or you’re not. The thing is, MJP is a clear standard. MJP allows all the debaters to rank all the judges, and then the assignments are based on those ranks. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you only get A+ judges. It means that the system will try to give you the best judge it can on a mutual basis. Keep in mind that the system does look first to brackets, so your likelihood of getting mutual A+ judges (provided you and your opponent have any) is greatest when you’re on the bubble. In other words, you’ll get your best judging when you’re down 2. We do those first, then the down 1s, then the down 0s, and then everybody else. This makes competitive sense and, after all, tournaments are competitions. Since there is a lot at stake at many tournaments, you want to give people their best shot at doing well. Assignments by bracket do that.
But let’s look at any pool of judges. Generally a pool is broken down into known circuit judges, first-years who were very successful in high school, old-time coaches, new-time coaches, experienced parents and inexperienced parents. The more competitive teams can easily distinguish among these groups, and also easily prioritize within these groups. What happens at a strong competitive tournament, as a result, is that the range of the most preferred judges to the least preferred judges is, in fact, exactly as I’ve listed them, seasoned to taste: known circuit judges, first-years who were very successful in high school, old-time coaches, new-time coaches, experienced parents and inexperienced parents, in that order. Depending on overall numbers (as in, if it’s really tight, everybody works), there is little question that the most preferred judges will get used more than the least preferred. There’s nothing wrong with that, and that’s why, if I can, I like to pre-assign rounds off, to give the highly preffed a chance to take a nap or eat the odd burrito. But one thing I’ve noticed is that the most competitive schools in the field tend to really not agree all that often. As a matter of fact, the most competitive $ircuit schools tend to almost inevitably disagree on almost every judge except for a really tiny handful (if that). Which means that it’s often the hardest to find an A+ match for the most competitive schools, which means that, the further they are away from the bubble, the less likely they are to get an A+, because there’s only so many of these matches to go around. So the 2s and the 3s and, gasp, even the 4s and 5s might come into play.
So what about that alternative of using 1-2s and 2-1s instead of lower mutuals. Well, if nothing else, this virtually guarantees that the lowest preferred judges will never get a round, or that the only rounds they judge will be pretty dreadful. Want to alienate a big portion of your judge pool, and turn off the newcomers who would eventually learn? Marginalize the lowest prefs even more than they already are, then; that should do it. Or look at it like this, that the people who aren’t in the top brackets will never get a top judge, even though the dumbest schlub debater in the building paid just as much to register as the guy with 11 TOC bids. I have heard from people who should know better that my obligation to pair carefully ends once I get to people who are no longer getting to elims. I disagree. Granted, I don’t give them first pick, but they are due the respect of the tournament nonetheless, and I try to give it to them. If I randomly assigned judges to everyone out of competition, we’d save a lot of time. And I would hate myself, and find another brilliant way to spend my weekends, because this would obviously not be the right one.
But here’s the real bottom line. At the moment we go to 1-2s and 2-1s, we are giving teams not 10% of the field to strike, but 60-70% or so. I mean, they’ll never get another 3 again, at least if they’re on or above the bubble. Is that what we want in debate? I would suggest that we might indeed want it at TOC or NDCA, the ultimate contests with unique judging pools, but everywhere else? No. Aside from the harms to the activity as a whole by virtually invalidating a large portion of the pools at most tournaments, and condemning everyone who isn’t a top debater to a distinctively crummier experience never being given great critiques by a top adjudicator, you’re also deluding yourself about your so-called competitive abilities. If you can’t pick up ballots from everyone in the field except your strikes, and you want to effectively strike 70% of the pool, well, pal, you don’t deserve to win.
It’s as simple as that.
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