(I’ll just point this out, off topic: I learned over the weekend that, shockingly, I am a horrible person. Thank God this has been made known to me with great clarity. Or at least I think with great clarity, as I didn’t actually read the emails explaining at length the depth of my horrific nature, and blocked future emails from arriving in my inbox that might offer further elucidation. Obviously my critic is not a member of the VCA, which has always known that I am, by nature, a miserable human being. I hate having to bring these noobs up to speed on such obvious points.)
Meanwhile, back in the jungle…
We had a most illuminating debriefing on MJP after the sun had set on Bigle X. I had been otherwise engaged during the tournament, playing with novices and the RR, but I certainly audited everything Kaz and JV were doing, watching closing as they did the pairings, seeing where the issues might arise. From a tab room perspective, obviously, the clear goal is to provide the highest ranked judges possible as often as possible, i.e., to give the people what they want to the best of tab’s ability. This meant that, almost without fail, people were getting their mutual ones or, occasionally, their mutual twos. Once in a while the ranking went down, but still, the nature of MJP is such that, even if you’re both getting, say, a four, it’s a mutual four. But as I say, that was quite rare.
But there are problems. (And I want to hash this out publicly with the great minds of TVFT within the next few weeks.) And I think the problems are inherent in an MJP tournament, and maybe any tournament that isn’t strikes and dice. One of them is solvable. The other is disturbing. Let’s take them one at a time.
First of all, for the most part all the people in the field rank the same judges highly. In a way, MJP is a bit of a subterfuge. There is very little difference, if any, between the way the community as a whole ranks judges and individual rankings. But, of course, when there is a difference, the debaters would prefer their rankings to the group rankings. So while for the most part it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, occasionally it does matter, and people get what they want. Still, the end result is that about 25 to 50 percent of the pool is highly ranked by everyone. This means that 25 to 50 percent of the pool get to judge every round. Every flight. Every everything. We are working our highest ranked judges into the grave. A few judges might enjoy this, but it’s not a great idea. Even with hireds, who the tournament might claim are getting paid and can therefore judge over and over again, deserve a bit of a break. The thing is, in tab, we’re not doing this. We’re just grabbing the judges by their preferred status and plopping them into one round after another. (I’m not citing this as a bad practice by JV and Kaz last weekend, but as a general practice of which I am more than guilty. And it’s also true in many non-MJP situations.) I think we need to set out a commitment to giving each judge at least one round off. We did this at Big Jake, where we had a ton of judges. Our solution was to go through the pool in advance and mark everyone for a specific round off, starting with round 1 for judge #1, round 2 for judge #2, and so forth, repeating the sequence after we got to round seven for the next batch of judges. This gave everyone at least one round where their names simply would not pop up, so they could go off and catch a nap or something. And it distributed the off rounds off fairly through the population. For the handful of judges already marked for a round off, we just went by them as they were already accounted for. We didn’t make any big deal out of this, but I don’t recall anyone stampeding tab and threatening our lives with a railway share due to overwork. I think that, in almost every tournament, we can perform this same sort of judge-benefit system. If we’ve got the numbers, we should treat them kindly.
The other issue is more difficult. The thing is, all this preferencing of judges is creating what can only be seen as an underclass of judges, or maybe more precisely, a balkanization of certain judges in any given pool into an underclass. Strikes are one thing, and often strikes are handed out to another person’s A+, although usually strikes go mostly to people whose first name is either Mr. or Mrs. Beyond that, the unfamiliar names, and there are always some, get the bottom rating. These unfamiliar names comprise, I think, two groups. First, there are the parents, the chaperones, whatever, who may have been carefully trained and are all worried and ready, and they spend the whole weekend in the judges’ lounge, trying to determine if that black stuff in their cups really is coffee. As PJ pointed out, these people can just as easily stay home for all the use that is made of them. Secondly, there are the perfectly competent judges who are simply unfamiliar because they’ve been doing something else for a while. There are plenty of ex-debaters or former coaches or whatever who could judge just about anything, perhaps with the exception of extreme speed, but because their names ring no bells, they are marginalized at tournaments. Again, they could have stood in bed, for all the use that is made of them.
I don’t have a lot of solution to this problem. Of course, if there is a novice division, that does take care of it. On the other hand, putting these folks into PF looks like it takes care of it, but especially parents, eager to do their bit after having read the training materials or watched practice rounds or whatever, are usually thrown into a tizzy when they learn that, all of a sudden, they’re in the pool for some other activity altogether. Explaining to them that their newness is somehow a plus in PF seldom convinces them, even though it is (at the moment) true.
I’m curious about what folks think about these issues, especially the balkanized judges. As I said, I hope to hash some of it out with Bietz and O’C on TVFT. We don’t really do ourselves or the activity a favor by making people do nothing for a whole weekend. If we really don’t want certain judges, then we should do something about it, although I question if that is really the case. At the point where we create a completely exclusive class of A judges, we are on the road to terminating the activity because, as anyone doing the math can tell you, there will be an every decreasing number of them. (See also this thing called Policy for further information on how to get fewer rounds for your team year after year.) And let’s face it, good judges don’t all start out that way. New coaches have to learn. The activity and the content changes from season to season. Last year’s A judge who doesn’t understand theory is this year’s strike. Some of this is the nature of the beast, but some of it could be the beast getting out of control. Whichever it is, it is something to be concerned about.
1 comment:
Well, I'd like to think that there are some things that can be done besides despair. The "nobody heard of her because she wasn't around last week and our memories are only good for seven days" problem can largely be helped by having little micro-biography/paradigms (twitter-sized) right on the strike sheet. You might think people could be looked up online, but outside of the TOC that just doesn't generally happen.
The Mrs. X problem is rather different. Part of it stems from the fact that debaters, like all HS kids, enjoy their fads, and Mrs. X is not going to vote for their faddish things. But a second substantial problem is that I as a coach don't want Mrs. X judging my students. Why, given that I'm old enough (barely) to remember slow debate, and would rather the students treated each other fairly upfront than ran theory? Three reasons. First because assuming that both debaters are of reasonably equal ability (power-pairing helps with this) and both slow down and sweep the jargon under the rug, I don't know what's going to make the critical difference in Mrs. X's eyes. It's like coaching athletes for an unnamed Olympic event--yes, stamina and strength help in all of them, but without knowing what the ratio is you can't be a very good coach. Second because Mrs. X writes terrible ballots--often there is only generic praise for both sides and no RFD at all. Teenagers have enough trouble dealing with failure when you can confidently help them to see what to do differently next time. And third, on the off-chance that Mrs. X actually has an understandable paradigm and writes a decent RFD, we'll still never see her again, so it's not as helpful as learning more about how to win in front of a judge we will see next week.
Mrs. X's best chance of breaking into respectability is to judge a double octafinal (where of course you need every judge desperately) and give a reasonable oral critique. Lots of people see the same outrounds, so they know very quickly then whether she's self- and community- consistent. If Mrs. X is actually a new, dedicated, and open-minded coach, this will happen before very long and she'll soon be on her way. If Mrs. X is a parent who judges twice a year, none of these factors will ever be overcome, and therefore none of the coaches or debaters will want her in the pool.
So is there any hope for improvement? Only allowing well-rated judges, as you note, creates a death-spiral. One thing I've done at my tournament, especially for parents of gifted freshman and such (therefore who are likely to stay around a while) is formally relieve them of their judging responsibilities on the condition that they shadow one of my better hired judges (who gains the added responsibility of all-day tutorial). If you're the sort of person who thinks that outsider-judging is an independent good that we're in danger of losing in our activity, you could simply decide that already-breaking debaters must debate in front of mutual-5s for bracket position. This actually has a couple of benefits assuming you're going to use those judges at all. First they judge rounds where the outcomes are actually monitored and influential in the community (unlike the 0-5 round) and give adaptation practice to the sort of debaters who end up teaching at summer institutes. Second, you get those judges away from the depressed sophomores in the 0-5 bracket who are already bitter, and are eager to dish that bitterness onto their paradigm-less, RFD-less judges who aren't helping them improve. These debaters want to be like the people they see in outrounds, who have highly preferred judges, and therefore have no emotional interest in improving their parent adaptation skills.
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