MJP Addendum: 1s and 2s and Nothing But 1s and 2s!!! (Cross-post from NDCA website)

First of all, let’s not overblow direness of the situation. In my experience, people do get nothing but 1-1 and 2-2 matches through the entire prelims at most tournaments, using the best practices I’ve outlined for categorization (http://www.debatecoaches.org/tabbing-best-practices/). We shouldn’t get too worried about getting a lot of 5-5s; I see maybe one every seventh tournament. Maybe two or three out of 50 pairings might be 3-3s per round at the average tournament, if that many, and occasionally there’s the odd 4-4. The tabroom.com software is very good at finding the best overall prefs. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the fact that we’ve set up the system to give the lesser mutualities to teams out of contention, and the higher mutalities to the bubbles. So for the most part MJP works exactly the way people want it to work.

Be that as it may, a large number of people insist that they should only get either 1 or 2 judges, period. They want 1-1s and 2-2s in that order, but they’ll take a 1-2 weighted against them over anything else. As I say, this doesn’t come up often, but it does come up. It can usually be addressed in the tab room, and all 3-3s or lower could probably be made to go away in favor of 1-2s in in-contention rounds, except in the most extreme of situations.

But the fact that it can be done is not a reason to do it.

What are the reasons behind wanting a 1-2 rather than a lower mutuality? Basically, it boils down to one thing: the perception that you’re getting a “better” judge. Certainly you’re getting one you ranked more highly than any alternative. And although no advance ranking is a guarantee of a win, the answer to this is, yes, you would be getting what you and your opponent both think is a better judge.

But that’s not all there is to it. Let’s look at the ramifications of not using anything but your 1s and 2s.

First of all, there is no question that the field evaluates the pool pretty much the same. Some judges are favored by almost everybody and some judges are favored by almost nobody, up and down the line. Same people, tournament after tournament. With exceptions, everybody’s 1s and 2s are everybody else’s 1s and 2s.

Going by my math in the previous articles, in a field of 60 with 6 tiers, 10% are strikes, and the other 5 tiers are 18% each. If you only use 1s and 2s, you get to strike roughly 65% of the field, probably more once you throw in your conflicts. Striking over 65% of the field!!!??? The guiding principle in setting up competition is to make the competition meaningfully competitive. Striking about two thirds of the field sounds suspiciously uncompetitive to me. Given the general uniformity of preferences (i.e., most teams pref pretty much like every other team), limiting the nature of the pool seems to indicate that our most competitive teams are only capable of picking up ballots from a minority of the judges. If that’s true, that’s a pretty weak sort of competition, and not much of a scale for weighing competitiveness at an event.

It’s hard to come up with a meaningful analogy to this. The closest I can think of is that we provide 9 Olympics judges for an event but each contestant gets to pick 3 judges that the contestant wants to judge the match, and only those 3 scores will count. Would we call that competitive?

I would point out that, at least in LD, it was not that long ago when the strength of a debater was measured by the debater’s ability to pick up ballots across a broad spectrum of judges. Judge adaptation was considered an important skill. In a real-world sense, this remains true, because the first rule of all public speaking is to know and adjust to your audience. We’ve put it the other way around: go get an audience that knows and adjusts to you. That’s wrong-headed in terms of long-term benefits from the activity. And wrong-headed in terms of actually demonstrating competitive strength. It demonstrates strength only across a narrow spectrum. So it is both not competitive and not educational.

The narrowing of the acceptable pool has further, more objective issues. As we continue to focus on the smallest number of adjudicators as the primary judges, and those judges represent a single approach to the activity—which they do—those judges get to be the ones who determine what wins and loses. Of course judges decide who wins and loses, but if it’s the same judges week in and week out, and if agendas are abroad among those judges, i.e., any sort of measurable preferences for particular styles or materials, debate will be molded to those styles and those materials. Given that these judges tend to be college students with short-term commitments to the activity and not much more educational wisdom than the people they are judging, this has inherent problems that seem absolutely manifest to me. This is a value judgment on my part, but I simply don’t believe that the nature of high school debate should be determined by college students.

Further, and more dangerously, relying on a small percentage of the pool has the affect of alienating the rest of the pool to the point of ghettoization. Ignoring this threatens the very viability of an event. Keep in mind that the well-run tournament already uses mostly 1s and 2s, and this is a problem I’ve addressed by suggesting that tournament directors allow people to opt into judging other divisions where they will be used well, as compared to sitting around all weekend wondering why they bothered to come in the first place, maybe getting a round or two near the end of the weekend adjudicating among the down-4s. I have nothing against down-4s—they deserve educational, well-adjudicated rounds just like everyone else—but from a judge’s point of view, a little of that goes a long way. If we wish to keep programs committed to debate, we need to keep their coaches committed to debate, and that will not happen if we allow their coaches to stew doing nothing all weekend. This of course doesn’t take into consideration the potential isolation of specific cultural groups, an important and real issue that goes beyond the scope of what I’m discussing here, but which cannot be ignored.

So the way I see it, the only argument for going non-mutual if mutuality exists at a less favorable match than a 2-2 pairing, is that a team is prepared only to win a specific sort of round in front of a specific sort of judge, and the competition should favor that. Which is, in fact, the argument against it: only being able to win a specific sort of round in front of a specific sort of judge limits the debaters. It limits the nature of the activity by favoring only some judges, and on top of that it has negative overall effects on the judge pool in general.

There might easily be a better system than MJP for assigning judges. But MJP that only goes as far as 2-2s is not it.
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