Ryan makes good points in reply to what I said yesterday, especially the size of neg cases. I should clarify my feelings about standards, though. I don’t mean simple as in simplistic and vague, because that’s certainly no good. I just meant not so complicated that it takes me a paragraph of flowing to write down and when I have to think about it as a weighing mechanism I abandon the field. In fact, one of the rounds I judged had exactly the sort of simplistic standard that was so easily shot down that it might as well have not existed. So we’re probably on the same page at least there.
Meanwhile, the Friday morning of the RR I mostly spent setting up the regular tournament. Normally this isn’t all that big a deal, but we allowed 5 individual strikes, which meant a lot of entering data for me and O’C. Not hard, just time consuming. I’m beginning to believe that, first, individual strikes are the way to go as the more positive benefit to debaters when compared to the broader-based team strikes, and second, that 5 strikes in a pool of 40 is absolutely invisible in the tabbing process. Set as a percentage, maybe you could strike as much as 15% of a pool and have no harm in the tabbing process. Of course, some judges are wildly unpopular and struck by practically the entire field, but the program assigns the hardest-to-place judges first, which means that their unpopularity isn’t really a problem. I mean, nobody is 100% struck. And if they were, you’d be encouraging them to take up another hobby anyhow. Number One way to get struck? Have Mr. or Mrs. as your first name. (Coaches, please. Can’t you ask your parents what their names are?)
I should point out, by the way, that there are no turns in Newark. Not in the rounds, but on the streets. We stayed out at the tournament hotel by the airport, and coming and going both, you could see your destination, just over there, a mere left or right turn away, but lo and behold, there was always a sign saying, “Don’t even think about turning, you yabbo.” Every time we needed to get off the road we were on, we spent a month or two exploring the jungles and deserts and caves and mountains of Newark rather than just turning left or right. This is, I think, the city elders’ way of promoting tourism. Since people don’t necessarily come to Newark as a vacation spot, whenever people do stumble into town they are forced to explore every inch of it whether they want to or not. There is no way around this. So it goes.
Thanks to aggressive judge acquisition by the Newark folks, the VLD part of the tournament was single-flighted. This is both good and bad. It’s good in that things move along, but bad in that literally every judge gets used just about every time. In the random rounds, you get what you get. Once there’s a bubble, As go to the down 2s, and by the time you get out of the problem areas, it’s good luck Charlie. The Mr. and Mrs. judges get to see a lot of undefeated debaters for a couple of rounds, until we can move them over to he defeated debaters. This is good insofar as the best debaters have no choice but to adapt, and bad for about the same reason, that the best debaters, all prepped for a killer round against one another, are forced to tone it down a bit. Again, so it goes.
Overall the weekend went well from our perspective. I kept having to move away from the machine in the VLD breaks because of having my own horse in the race, I can’t exactly hand-pick judges from the ever-diminishing pool for my own debater, but O’C was up to the task. We do have a pattern of assigning judges in breaks that gets us past this problem most of the time, going up and down the rounds with the judges as they are offered, but when you get into quarters and further, and you have a lot of possibilities, this doesn’t make sense. Which is why we don’t have just one school in the tab room at invitationals. Not that we’d be all that corrupt (well, maybe you would be, but not me) but to allay even the appearance of corruption. I want people to think of me as the Honest Abe of Tab. Honest Jim.
Whatever.
2 comments:
unless the pool of judges for the tournament is like below 30, you should ALWAYS get to strike 30%-50% of the pool. striking 10 judges in a pool of 70 has almost zero effect. striking 20 in a pool 0f 70 gets closer, striking 30-40 in a pool of 70 makes the most sense.
i believe that MJP should offer you a limited set of true 1's (perhaps between 5-10) and ALWAYS more strikes than 1's. getting judges you don't want has a higher comparative negative value than getting judges who you were forced to overrank as a 1 has a positive value.
Tom,
I don't think that would work so well in practice. First because if say a third of the judges are struck because everyone thinks they're bad, rather than personal or ideological reasons, you're talking 10-15% of the pool that may not be able to judge any rounds at all. Obviously problematic.
Second because while it might work in prelims, in outrounds at tournaments without heavy hiring (ie where judges are actually at a premium), rather than getting a 1-1-5 mutual panel, which is workable if not ideal, you could easily end up with no available judges. When teams start to pack up and head out, even impressively varied tournaments can be really tight for judging.
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