NDCA has to have generated more mail among staff and board than any twenty other tournaments. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just a curiosity. Usually we stumble into tournaments and hope for the best, praying that at least some of the contingencies have been prepared for. Here, if something hasn’t been prepared for, I’d be shocked. I think our hosts are even providing kielbasa. What else could anyone possibly want (Other than the Panivore)?
Going back to the subject of MJP, one of the issues that has to be realized is that, without it, and short of going totally random, decisions are still going to be made by someone about who gets to judge what. We have tried community ranking and found that it is pretty much exactly the same as what the traveling tab room would rank the judges. Our overall perception is the same as the community’s overall perception, in other words. We tend to go by experience more than anything else, unless a judge has demonstrated consistently inane ballots with useless commentary and baffling RFDs (we do try to see who’s doing what, as much as time permits). The sense is that most coaches and most ex-debaters provide reasonable adjudication, and thus we want them in the most competitive rounds. MJP presumably does the same thing, although it does eliminate the judge who always drops you. (So do simple strikes, come to think of it, but a couple of people—obviously not PJ—who have griped to me about MJP also have griped that their own crappy judges all got struck, and that this was all some sort of commie plot or something.) In my busy judging years, there were people who simply could not pick up my ballot, not because of malice on my part, or many times even recognition. I’d go into a round, judge somebody for the fifteenth time without recognizing them, and drop them for the fifteenth time. For them, it was epic. For me, it was one more round. For that matter, there were people I almost always picked up, and it’s commonplace that at any juncture in the activity there are people everyone is always picking up. These were not biases on my part, at least not consciously. Some people consistently lost and some consistently won. What can I say? I was involved in one epic stretch quite knowingly (albeit not maliciously), dropping one particular debater pretty much week after week for three years until I started picking her up all the time when she was a senior. What happened? I have my opinion, but the thing is, wouldn’t she have been justified in striking me as much as possible? From either of our positions, it was uncomfortable. So why not just move along? Everybody has a judge or two they can’t pick up come hell or high water, and it’s not a matter of adapting or getting better, it just is what it is. Why does a debater have to face that judge? What possible benefit can that be for anyone? Anyhow, I think that MJP isn’t all that different from tab rankings, and it does eliminate the perceived stinkers, or at least, if strikes would otherwise still be available, allows for some distinctions (keeping in mind that in MJP, a 3-3 or 4-4 is considered mutual, if not necessarily the priority).
I will point out that people who debate well tend to win at tournaments regardless of the judging structure. They win with MJP, they win parent judges, they win every damned thing. As I say, I’m not convinced that much of it makes that much difference, aside from judges whose incompetence is broadly manifest, i.e., the ones who obdurately refuse to listen and pay attention, the ones who don’t speak English, and the ones whose elevator doesn’t reach the top floor…
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