The chief goal of a tab room is to provide fair rounds in a
timely fashion. This may sound simple and straightforward, but I’m pretty sure
that it wouldn’t take more than a handful of people parsing that sentence for
two minutes before we start disagreeing about the words chief, goal, fair and
timely, either their definitions or their application. I am part of a
particular group that agrees fairly deeply on most of these. I will use the
evidence that this group is invited to tab just about everything in the
northeast that they humanly can as an endorsement of that shared belief. (An
alternative reason for our continuous invitations might be that we are the only
people crazy enough to be willing to do it. I’ll leave that determination to
you.)
I’ll put aside questions of fairness in this discussion. I
take it as a given. Even if it weren’t, our primary tool, tabroom.com, is
mechanical and blind. Further, if one of us wished to override it for some
particular advantage, there is always someone else around to maintain honesty.
Obviously I have no doubts about the integrity of my tabbing colleagues, but to
an outsider, the presence of conflicting coaches provides the perception of
fairness. The perception, in our case, matches the reality. If I were asked
about how tab rooms should be staffed, however, I would always answer that
there should be people representing different schools. It’s just a better way
to do things all around.
The other side of the coin, then, is “in a timely fashion.”
When I used to run Bump, I told the team that ending the tournament was our
highest priority. That is, rounds needed to start on time and finish the
appropriate amount of time later. Ballots needed to get to the judges without
delay, and back tab in the blink of an eye when a round ended. Moving the
tournament along was everyone’s main job.
If getting ballots to judges quickly, and getting the
ballots back quickly, are paramount, why do I not use e-ballots every week?
That is the question I want to answer here.
(Obviously we’ll discount the situations where there is no
reliable wifi, which is more high schools than you’d might expect. The vision
of fully plugged-in education is, at the moment, still only a vision for a lot
of people.)
First of all, there is the question of physical plant. The
only way e-ballots work is if everyone is close enough for tab to verify that
the judges and the debaters are in the room when they are supposed to be, or there is enough tournament staff to do this across a tournament's entire geography. I
would love to live in a world where the judges hit the start button when they
start a round, but they don’t. Many hit the button as soon as they get the
assignment. Many hit the button right before they enter their decision. One of
the people asking us last weekend why we hadn’t e-balloted the Gem was one of
the most notorious of people who hits the start button when the spirit moves
him, if at all, rather than when he should. He is a top judge, always very
highly preferred. If not him, who? On the other side of this, it is almost
inevitably the less experienced judges who hit start when they get the assignment.
One might make the argument that they need to be educated, but that will not
happen. They will judge this weekend, and disappear into the ether. That is the
case with the majority of PF judges. Every weekend, a different parent. Sometimes
every round is a different parent. They trade assignments with their spouses. They are not in a position to live and learn.
And they take up a lot of time to educate through multiple tournaments,
considering that they probably won’t judge at multiple tournaments. I have
trouble getting my usual suspect I mentioned above to hit a start button after at least two years
now. How to I get a judge who’s registered with the first name “Mr.” to figure
it out?
If we have the physical plant, we will do e-ballots, at
least for LD. At some places we’ll even do it for PF, although there are always
a couple of Luddites who need paper ballots even when all around them are
electronic. Yes, printing ballots for them mollycoddles them and caters to the
lowest common denominator. It also gets the round started on time. I can live
with the opprobrium.
If we have a tournament where judges are notoriously
unreliable, we will use paper ballots and, lately, judge calls. As a rule,
tournaments at the Ivies fall into this category. Keep in mind that often space
is at a premium, and different divisions are sharing the same rooms at
different times. Dilly-dallying is not an option. I can’t offer an actual
number, but there is a large percentage of attendees at Ivy tournaments who
make this their one big event of the year. It’s the only tournament they travel
to. The rest of the time they do local events, often just scrimmages and the
like, plus maybe one circuit tournament not too far away. They are not
desperate bid seekers going to every tournament on the $ircuit. They’re hacks.
Amateurs. They’re there for the experience. Personally, I would like to have
them come back next year, probably with all new people, to repeat the tournament experience because it was a good one, plus they got to see the university and see
a few sites in the city while they were there.
Judge calls work. It is as simple as that. We tell people to
be there at a certain time, we hand out the ballots, we push the handful of
ballots originally assigned to people who don’t believe that 8:00 is 8:00, and
then the rounds go off as they should. This works. Every time. It worked at
Princeton. It worked at Penn. It worked at Columbia. All three tournaments
required complex room switches as the weekend progressed. Two of them required
alternative rooms between divisions. Engineering a working tournament was our
job in tab. Judge calls was how we did it. (And no, we don’t do it just to rack
up fines. We don’t want fines, we want judges. I don’t give a hoot about fines,
unless a school or a judge conducts regular bad citizenry, in which case they
should have to pay for their misdeeds.)
Note, by the way, that we were not exclusively p-ballots at
Penn. We did e-ballots for two divisions of LD and one of Policy, and that
worked fine because they had discrete room assignments and mostly reliable
judges. One or two rounds fell through the cracks, but we coped. So we’re not
mindlessly applying a no e-ballot rule wherever we go. We are applying a system
that we think is best for getting a tournament moving in a timely fashion.
I do believe that we will sooner or later evolve into
e-ballots wherever the host has the wifi to handle it. But I might still do
some version of judge calls, just to verify that the 600 or so souls we’ve just
sent across hundreds of acres of campus to different venues have some clue as
to what’s happening. But I do not see a future any time soon where everyone has a
device, or the ability to use that device, for e-balloting. Once a person
reaches the point where a decision has been made that the person is “bad at
technology”—and this decision can be made by any person over the age of about
twelve, so don’t tell me it’s an old people thing (I speak for old people
everywhere!) or that kids nowadays blah blah blah because they aren’t—there is
no help for them. But as time goes by and the bar gets lower as the tech gets easier and more familiar, ever the worst luddites will come eventually come around. Not in the next week or two, though.
So we will continue to evaluate every tournament based on
the resources of that tournament vis-à-vis staff and space, the attendees, the
judges, in a word, the whole shooting match, and make what we think is the best
determination. I don’t guarantee that we will always be right, but we will
always be doing our best to get a tournament running in the most timely manner
possible. Remember, we were there before you in the morning, and we’re going to
be there later at night. And e-ballots are less work for us. And we want to get
out of there. You know we’ll be doing whatever we can to make that happen.
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