Speaker awards

O’C poses an interesting question about speaker awards on ATM, although the ensuing thread isn’t all that exciting. I figured since I’m paying the big bucks to Blogger (and unlike O’C, I don’t get $5K per post for my gambling purse) I’d post some thoughts here rather than there. For that matter, I think ATM should hire me as a correspondent, or more to the point, host my blog, because I could really use that $5K per, especially when O’C and I go on our Monti bender. We could go from there to Vegas, and maybe pop up to Foxwoods once in a while when things are a little slow at the MHL.

Anyhow, speaker awards. Which means speaker points. And the first curious thing about speaker points is that no two people seem to agree on what they are. There’s no objective criterion for awarding points, no Olympics-like structure where a double axel is worth 2.5 or a drop impacted back to both standards is 5 points or whatever. There’s no sense of what points are for: are they for quality of presentation, or are they so-called debating points? Of course, points are usually used for organizing brackets in tabulation, but even there some demurral occurs, and people suggest things like opponent wins or judge variance should take preference. Since no two people agree what points are, as soon as any two people begin discussing them, the discussion tends to go nowhere because of the lack of common ground. Still, speaker awards are not uncommon, which means that more often than not, awards are being given based on a system that can be seen as complex, at best, and totally confused and meaningless at worst.

And then there’s the proposed Legion of Doom speaker point system, which I adamantly opposed. I don’t know if I posted my thoughts on that here for the Vast Coachean Army, but in a nutshell, the proposal was that points should range from 20 to 30, with each judge charged to assign an average of 25 by the end of the tournament. They would use the whole range (although, let’s face it, it’s not really the whole range because there’s that 0-19 group that would feel so left out and would get depressed and end up doing crack and robbing convenience stores), with 25 as the center. You can extrapolate the numerical outcome from there. I think this proposal was predicated on, if you have all those numbers (excluding the convenience store robbers), you ought to use them. My arguments were, first, that the present system wasn’t particularly broken and didn’t need fixing, and second, that this system was so contrary to accepted practice that it would be impossible to institute, and that nothing would be more catastrophic than a tournament where some judges were using the old system and others were using the new system. One man’s 25 is another man’s 28? There’s enough confusion already. Did we really need to add a whole new level of confusion to make it worse?

But as you can see, my first argument was that the present system isn’t broken. So that’s what we need to talk about here. If there’s so much confusion, if there’s no common ground, and no agreement that awards are justified (although I would suggest that the majority of the LD tribe does like speaker awards and that the no-award contingent is a very small minority), how can we say that the present system isn’t broken? Because, in a word, it works.

Regardless of how I award speaker points versus how you award speaker points, at the end of every tournament there is an ordered list of speakers, from top to bottom. And the very top speakers are consistent from tournament to tournament, in front of the aggregated judge pool across the country. The top speakers at national $ircuit tournaments are the top speakers at regional tournaments and CatNats and NFLnats—the whole banana. And I’m separating these from the winners. That is, it is not unusual for the top record, the 6-0, to not be the top speaker; although it is unlikely for consistent winners to be consistently poor speakers, it certainly does happen. It is more unlikely for top speakers not to be at the very least consistent breakers, if not necessarily winning finalists. But my point is that there is a distinction, often enough, between the top finalist winners and the top speakers. Somehow or another different aspects of the debates are being adjudicated in the win/loss and speaker point areas. And while we may disagree on what each of us is doing when we’re assigning points, somehow we seem to come up with the same results despite those disagreements. So there seems to be pretty compelling quantitative evidence that speaker points are separate from simply winning. They may include winning, but they mean something else too.

Which leaves question, is that something else worth rewarding? That is, even if we grant that the winner of the tournament is not the top speaker often enough to demonstrate that speaker points are awarded for some other criteria than win/loss, are speaker points worthy of recognition just because they’re different? They would have to be different in aid of something good or positive or worthy of recognition in order to garner that recognition. And here it might get a little more ethereal. While it may be acceptable to grant that the process of awarding points is a black box, is the fact that it’s a consistent black box make it a valuable black box? Here we have no choice to look at not the regularity of the top speakers but the identities of the top speakers. That is, quantitative analysis won’t answer this argument; we need to look at qualitative analysis. Let’s take a representative sampling, from Big Bronx (which thinks it’s the oldest continual tournament in the country, except that it’s younger than Bump):
▪ 1999: Noah Grabowitz - Hendrick Hudson High School (NY)
▪ 2000: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field - Hunter College High School (NY)
▪ 2001: John Olivieri - Hendrick Hudson High School (NY)
▪ 2002: Kendra Oyer - Wooster High School (OH)
▪ 2003: Matt Scarola - Syosset High School (NY)
▪ 2004: Caitlin Halpern - W.T. Woodson High School (VA)
▪ 2005: Jacob Levi – Berkeley Carroll
Of those 7, only one, the talented and lovely Mr. Scarola, won the tournament. And I would suggest that if you look at just about any tournament, you’ll see similar results (including at Bump). A consistent list of very strong debaters with undeniable skills, separate from the list of winners (obviously also very strong debaters with undeniable skills). So what’s the difference? Well, despite all the confusion over what makes a good speaker, or why speaker points are awarded, and my resulting willingness to consider the process a black box, THESE PEOPLE ARE ALL REALLY REALLY REALLY GOOD SPEAKERS.

Imagine that. An activity that requires public speaking plus competitive chops that somehow manages, successfully (and in a pure cloud of ignorance), to reward both.

So, yeah, it’s a system that seems to defy analysis, but it works, if we agree that Noah and Liz and the Olive and company were all exceptionally capable of impressing their audiences. And if you don’t agree with that, I’ll probably want to strike you next time I get the opportunity.