Ah, you aesthete, you. Your palate is so refined, I can only envy you. Whereas the average schlub on the street is lucky to know the difference between a link turn and a link sausage, you on the other hand can differentiate between a 26.2 and a 26.3 on the speaker scale using tenths of a point.
Do you extend your pinky when you are writing your ballot?
Okay, I may be wrong about this, but members of the VCA, knowing my track record of (admitted) wrongness, realize that I’m only saying that in case the Mayans were right and 2012 is the end of the world and I’m going to want to sing “Kumbaya” with people on the other side of the question as the earth falls into the sea and I won’t want this hanging over our heads in those last few moments. The thing is, I’ve seen too many studies that absolutely disprove that people could possibly rank speeches on a scale of 1 to 100. Or 1 to 50. 1 to 20 is out of reach. 1 to 10? Good luck.
Here’s the deal. The average person, given choices, is able to discriminate about 7 of them. There’s variation of course, but not much. If you give people too many choices, they balk. In marketing, either they don’t buy your product, or they default to the simplest option. Any wonder why vanilla is the top selling flavor at Baskin Robbins? Even been in a restaurant and someone looks at the menu and says, “There’s too many choices”? Ever felt that way yourself? Marketers use choice to set up a paradigm that their product offerings are diverse and full and rich, not because they expect to sell all those products. It’s the cost of doing business. But you don’t want to be overwhelming, so you provide defaults. Whole Foods has 17 kinds of tomatillos; most people just buy the basic cherry tomatoes.
Even if you don’t buy that (a phrase that, when uttered in debate, makes me want to throw a desk at the speaker), in LD we have a solid, time-honored history of inability to create a decent speaker point scale. Because we have no objective criteria on which to make the measurement, it becomes entirely subjective. This is why I like the breakdown of win the tournament / definitely break / might break / shouldn’t break / needs work. Those are fairly definitive gestalts of a performance that can be roughly agreed to. When I’m talking to PF parent judges before a tournament, I tell them to use a grading scale like they learned in school, A, B, C, D, F. Add maybe a tiny gradation, and there’s your 7. People can handle that.
But a hundred point scale? It’s hard enough to separate a 29 from a 28, but you want to tell me you can differentiate a 28.1, a 28.2, a 28.3, a 28.4, a 28.5, a 28.6, a 28.7, a 28.8 and a 29.9 as well? Not to mention 29.1, 27.9, 29.2, 27.8, etc., etc., etc.
On top of this, the norm is not to assign the same amount of points. No ties. But there can still be low point wins? My mind doesn’t boggle, it literally falls out of its resting spot and onto the floor, where the cat chases it around until it gets lost under the closet door.
Get real, people. You may like to stick out your pinky and explain in excruciating detail why you can tell the difference between a male and a female fly at 200 yards in the dark while blindfolded (you, not the fly), but I know better. Tenths of a point? You can barely handle showing up within half an hour of the posted round start time, and as often as not you have so little idea what happened in the round that you have to read the cases. And that, indeed, is a 28.8?
Jeesh.
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