The Menick-Gilbert Judge-Rating Proposal

(HoraceMan, TSWAS, and I hashed out a lot of this on the long trip home from Kentucky. Any of the ideas you like are mine; any of the ideas that are flaky are his. Please let me know what you think.)

There can be little doubt that winning debate rounds is a (if not the) primary motivator of debaters. Debaters want to win, and whatever energy they spend on the activity, it is probably energy they perceive as working to achieve that goal. While many coaches might say that, educationally, the competition is merely a means to some other end, the students actually debating may or may not be aware of this, or directed toward this. If the debaters only wanted an education in philosophy, for instance, they would hire a tutor instead of a coach, and would take philosophy classes during the summer instead of enrolling in debate camps.

Secondly, no one possesses the holy grail of what the content of a debate round should or should not be. While I might feel strongly that a certain approach to LD is the best, someone else might reasonably feel another approach is the correct one. In an activity that inherently respects the dialectic, or at least the belief that ideas should be tested by their opposition to other ideas, it is hard to draw a line and say that a particular idea is unacceptable before it is tested, especially when the goal of most debaters is winning rounds. Let that idea go forth and see how it does; if it really is a bad one, it will fail in opposition to the good ones. It will win or lose rounds. (The only exception to this might be ideas that are generally accepted as socially abusive and preclusive of discourse, e.g. racism, but that is not an issue that need concern us here.)

Third, there is a clear schism in the LD community today. On one side are the proponents of so-called progressive debate. On the other side are what we might call the traditionalists or conservatives. The problem at hand is that, however one thinks of oneself as a debater (and there is no question that some debaters are self-described as progressive and others are self-described as traditional), when that debater is actually in a round, that debater wants a sense that the adjudicator of the round is willing to accept his or her style of debate without prejudice. That is, no debater wants to walk into a round knowing they will lose because the judge represents a different philosophy of what LD is or ought to be. Judging should, inherently, be unprejudiced. As for the two debaters in the round, it is often hard for traditionalists to accept some of the progressive agenda, and it is often hard for progressives to accept some of the traditionalist agenda. When the two approaches meet to debate, the dissonance is hard to adjudicate, if not impossible, from any other perspective than one’s one innate sensibility, regardless of how open the judge claims to be. So, while we would hope for unprejudiced judging, it is hard to guarantee. Any system that minimizes prejudice, or at least distributes it evenly, would be desirable to all involved.

The LDEP recommends a blind tab approach:
5. Do not allow judge ranks or preferences. These practices foster narrow and exclusive styles and shield students from meaningful criticism. Instead, encourage debaters to present themselves in a manner that is accessible to a wide range of audiences.

The problem with the LDEP recommendation is that while it would seem to encourage that debaters adjust to their judges, thus taking the position that adaptation should be accepted as inherent to the nature of LD (a policy to which I happen to agree), it overlooks other issues. One that bothers me especially from my own experience is that often teams register judges who are not trained for the job. While LDEP expects that judges will be trained, and offers training materials, and suggests that all Tournament Directors offer these or similar materials and give specific guidelines during opening assemblies, the ultimate responsibility for judge training falls completely on the team bringing the judges. Judges who do not understand LD, who have not been introduced to the resolution of the day, and who have no experience (and, I hate to say it, often don’t even speak English), should not be given an entitlement similar to the experienced judge, regardless of the experienced judge’s paradigm. There is a vast difference between making an argument to convince a judge who is comfortable sitting in the back of the room and making an argument to convince a judge that has no idea what to do or how to do it.

The purpose of the LDEP proposal is clear, since that purpose is explained in the second and third sentences. But those purposes miss the unfortunate existence of far too many judges who are incapable of giving meaningful criticism.

Additionally, and this is key, all elimination (and therefore TOC-bid) tournaments have bubble rounds, that is, rounds that will make the difference between making it to elimination rounds or not. It is far from unusual for tab rooms to rank judges so that these bubble rounds will be adjudicated by a pool of predetermined A judges. It is hard for me to imagine any situation where any tournament would want its most important rounds adjudicated by anyone other than its best, A, judges. The question is, what, exactly, is an A judge, given all the schismatic issues mentioned above?

There are also B judges and C judges, or at least I can create these in the Rich Edwards software. There is a tendency (sometimes of necessity, given the size of a judge pool) to place A judges on the bubbles and let the rest just happen, which means that Bs and Cs can be judging anything from undefeateds to the unvictorious. However, there are often speaker awards in contention, and certainly bracket placements depending on speaker points. For the sake of a meaningful tournament, persons who do not understand the normal processes of speaker points should not be in too much of a position to determine the winners of speaker awards. So C judges, who would, if we were using A/B/C placement, be your most (for lack of a better word) inept adjudicators, can seriously affect the results of a tournament not so much by their win/loss decision in a 4-0 round as by their lack of sense of the normative. In other words, it makes sense that a tournament would want its top bracket rounds judged at the very least by B judges, after the As were all assigned to the bubble.

C judges, such as they are, should be where they could do the least damage. They would certainly haunt the random rounds, but even there tab rooms can pretty much assure that, at the very least, no one gets two Cs in a row before the brackets kick in.

The question becomes, with all of this in mind, how do we assign A/B/C if we feel it necessary to do so? How do we, in a tab room, give debaters the best chance of doing well regardless of their or their judges’ paradigms? How do we protect them from patently incompetent judging? Well, I know how it’s mostly done now. The people in the tab room sit around and assign these rankings based on their own experiences/prejudices. In my own tournament, I allowed the registrants to rank their own judges, thus calling into play a different set of prejudices.

But the Menick-Gilbert Proposal would offer a different solution to this issue. I know of no tournament that doesn’t have the vast majority of its judges’ names well in advance of the event. Why not simply post all the judges names and let the registrants, by school, rank them as A/B/C? I post of a list of, say, 50 judges. 20 or so schools rank them all. (You could not rank a judge you strike, if a tournament offers strikes.) Then I feed them into Excel and sort them into quartiles (all right, tri-tiles). I’m not quite sure of the proportions, or how the math would work, but there’s no question that this system would give me a top-to-bottom grouping of all the judges; all I need to do in tab is adjudicate where the breaks between the groups are. My guess is that this math would be pretty elementary to anyone who was capable of entering the data into Excel in the first place.

The result would be that the tournament entrants, not the TD or the tab room, would decide who is an A or B or C (although, of course, the rankings would not be made public). With that information in hand, the tab room would place As on the bubbles, Bs on the top ranked rounds and Cs where they could do the least damage. Which means that progressive or traditional styles will win out not because of their match with progressive or traditional judges necessarily, but because the population of the tournament, school by school, has determined that these are the judges, of whatever stripe, that are best suited to decide what should happen at this tournament. No one can complain that the tournament is somehow being manipulated by progressive or traditionalist forces because the tournament population itself is in control. To the extent that judging controls the direction of LD, that direction, per this proposal, would be controlled by the population at large.

I think this is reasonable. I think this answers without prejudice a lot of issues surrounding LD judging. I will probably do this at the next Hendrick Hudson tournament (unless someone gives me some good reasons not to.)