The Night of the Living MJP

So, says you, how was the old MJP at Ridge?

First of all, the longer MJP keeps floating around in my mind, the less I am willing to come down against it. The argument in favor of it seems to be based on tab trying to provide the best judges for a given round, and adding the debaters into the decision-making process. That is, we believe that you should get a top judge when it most matters, on the bubble. We have our idea of who that judge might be, and the debaters have their idea. So, with MJP, we defer to the debaters’ idea. After all, they’re the ones in the fray. Given that at almost all tournaments we do manage the judging so that some measure of top judges go where they’re most needed, this is hard to argue with. I mean, we’re already most of the way there. This is all of the way.

The objection to community ranking, which takes the ranking of the judges out of the hands of the tab room and into the hands of the community at large, is that it requires a knowledge of the community. So it works pretty well for regional contests, but if someone comes in from outside the region, they can be at a disadvantage. Agreed. Of course, at $ircuit tournaments, non-$ircuit debaters don’t know the pool of judges as well as old hands, so it’s the opposite situation and the newbies suffer in that situation (and let’s admit it, paradigms are okay but not that predictive beyond things like taste in speed, theory and framework, and even then half of paradigms are noncommittal). I would prefer community rankings to tab room rankings most of the time (which is why, if I didn’t necessarily invent them, I certainly have been their greatest advocate, making them fairly common around here). Nine times out of ten, if not more, tab’s rankings will be identical to the community’s rankings, but the point is to allow the people in the tournament to help define the tournament. Community rankings is better for that than tab room rankings.

Anyhow, the counter argument (which I’ve made myself at times) is that a good LDer ought to be able to pick up any ballot (short of the totally idiotic judge whose paradigm is unpredictability). Pure roll of the dice, in other words. After all, both debaters have the same judge in each round, so they’re theoretically in the same position. But this makes some assumptions, such as, both debaters are identical in approach and therefore equally advantaged/disadvantaged. Let’s say one debater usually debates in front of relatively lay judges, and the other usually debates in front of circuit judges. If they’re now in front of one or the other, one of them is, obviously, advantaged in adaptation ability. So this argument isn’t totally convincing. And even absent that, most debaters come up being judged by parents and the like as newbies, and even the top circuit people get the lay judge once in a while, or the old-timer who hates what LD is today and wants all the debaters to get off their lawn, and they must needs learn how to handle those situations. So when you think about it, good debaters often do have to work what they might consider a less than congenial style than normal. But the good ones do it. You adjust. You adapt. All the MJP in the world (short of a tournament with an infinite number of judges able to provide infinite A+ A+ rounds) doesn’t really change that. So the theoretical argument against MJP isn’t as strong as it appears on face.

Anyhow, in practice, at least at Ridge, maybe half the field did a bunch of preffing and the other half didn’t. The result is that those who didn't pref face the judges preferred by those who did. Mostly this works out as the best judges in the field anyhow, so I would imagine the non-preferring debater isn’t all that disadvantaged most of the time. Teams that don’t even strike, on the other hand, are simply either masochistic, or their coaches are sadistic. Everybody has a couple of people they couldn’t win a ballot from even if their opponent didn’t show up. I know that in my judging days there were perfectly good debaters who I dropped 4 years running. I’d be hard-pressed to suggest that they shouldn’t have struck me if they had had the chance. Hell, I would have struck me if I had had the chance. Going into a round of So-And-So again, knowing that I’d dropped them the last hundred times, was no picnic on my end either.

Another thing, by the way, is that if neither side expressed a preference, they both get a random judge. Assuming that they preferred randomness, they got what they wanted. So the non-preferring either got a judge that their opponent certified as good, or a random judge in keeping with their own desire for randomness. The complaint window will mostly be closed on that one, folks.

My conclusions on MJP spiritually, in other words, seem to be evolving. Practically speaking, it was, as many had predicted, quite easy to work. If anything, it requires less input from tab than general rankings in prelims, and about the same amount of paying attention on elims. (We’ve worked out a very basic system that spreads out the good judges fairly across all the panels, and MJP or no MJP doesn’t have much effect on it, and it is a bit time-consuming.) My guess is that we will see more of MJP going forward. We’re talking Lexington, for instance. Probably not the Gem of Harlem or Unharvard. Certainly at Lakeland. I forget what JV was thinking about Scarsdale. So that’s a couple of shots, at least. And going into next year, O’C is already committed to it the Babycakes Invitational, if I’m not mistaken. So the northeast, those posters of results after each round (and brackets before elims start), instillers of MJP and calibrated run-off rounds and whatnot, are once again not quite the backwater people like to think of us as. We’re a different backwater altogether.