How MJP Really Works

JA was pretty adamant last weekend against MJP and its effects on LD, as is Pajamas W. They are far from alone in this.

They are also wrong.

First of all, in theory, all MJP does is allow people to rank the judges. Then tab assigns judges based on those rankings. That is, we try to give you 1-1s, or else 2-2s or whatever, the best number we can, always equal. We are not giving you the judges you want as a debater; we are giving the judges you and your opponent both prefer at the same level of preference. Granted, this means a lot of 1-1s, but it also means 2-2s and 3-3s and even, occasionally, 4-4s. The point is mutuality, not guaranteed bests.

Doing this, the argument goes, somehow prefs certain judges who are detrimental to the practice of LD. Well, no. If people all want certain judges over other judges, that’s going to happen anyhow, MJP or no MJP, because tournaments wanting to succeed financially will hire those judges, and teams who only have experience of those judges will bring those judges as their adjudicators, and MJP has nothing to do with it. Beyond that, I really don’t see the link between MJP and the Decline and Fall of LD. I have rants about various in-round practices going back over a decade, and rants about college judges pushing sketchy agendas, way before MJP was even a twinkle in the tabroomian eye. The claim that MJP pushes those practices and agendas has to stand against the alternatives, which are either community ranking, tab personnel ranking, or no ranking. Let’s look at each one individually.

No ranking at all means that a tournament is judged at random by whoever is in the field. I know some people like this idea, but they are not at the tournaments I am at, where every week some new, totally untrained judge (actually, usually more than just one) wreaks all sorts of havoc. By untrained I don’t mean they haven’t sat in one of our training sessions; I mean they have no idea that their kids were even on the debate team until they got dragged into this this morning, they have no idea what will happen in the rounds, and they spend more time in tab trying to get out of their obligation than they do actually judging. If these judges didn’t exist (and believe me, they do, and they are in endless supply), and if all the judges were at least trained to some extent, the idea of dice-toss assignments would be acceptable according to a certain vision of LD. But kids who work hard on their cases and their presentation deserve better than some whiny parent who literally—in the correct sense of the word literally—knows nothing about the activity.

By the way, these untrained judges ruin it for the trained judges. I see it week after week. There are plenty of parent judges who are fine adjudicators, well-trained and capable. Good debaters can easily develop strategies to pick up their ballots. But no debater wants to be judged by parent judges because of the fear of those untrained ones. All parents get tarred with the same brush. It isn’t MJP that is tainting these capable parents; it’s the schools that repeatedly bring raw, worthless adjudicators (the blame for which can be either at the coach level or the student level, because there’s no reason why coachless teams like YouKnowWho can’t train their own damned parents, coach or no coach). (My favorite worthless adjudicator whine, by the way, is that somehow the tabroom is responsible for training them. Hello? The tabroom is responsible for tabbing the tournament along the lines set out by the tournament director. I’ve published all sorts of documents on how to judge; what do you want me to do? Stop tabbing and read them to you aloud, and then tuck you in with Teddy in your arms and a smile on your lips? Grow up.)

If we can’t go totally random, we can have some sort of rankings. The tabroom can rank everyone, or we can have the community rank everyone, from which rankings assignments are made of the highest ranks first on the bubbles. The thing is, tabroom rankings simply perpetrate the beliefs of the tabroom, however right or wrong they may be. I think that certain people are good judges, and that others aren’t. What gives me the right to assign on the basis of my personal beliefs? As for community rankings, they simply do the same thing on a grander scale in what is perceived as, but in fact isn’t, a more democratic fashion. I have a lot of experience with community rankings, and they inevitably worked out to give the highest rankings to the college/circuit judges. Why the mechanics of this worked out that way could be because a lot of schools didn’t vote, or maybe because familiar names always win. I’m not sure, but in any case, tabroom staff is biased and so is the community as a whole, which is democratic only insofar as voting is open to one and all, but closed in that the results are predictably parochial.

MJP theoretically removes the bias of both the tabroom and the community. The thing is, people who are against MJP often don’t rank. If you don’t rank, we put you in as a blank, and give you the highest ranked judge of the opponent. If neither of you rank, you get whoever is left over after all the preferences are adjudicated. When I say we I mean the software; there’s less hands-on in MJP than any other tabbing, at least in large fields. And that is the core of one of the best arguments in favor of MJP, that it is automatic and non-biased by outside influences.

Here’s the thing. People who don’t “like” MJP don’t rank. People who don’t rank get the judges of the people who do rank. The people who do rank tend to prefer college/circuit judges. Therefore, at most tournaments the college/circuit judges direct the results.

This can be changed. If everyone ranked, then every judge in the pool would be up against every other judge in every round, and tabbing really would find the judge that both debaters mutually prefer. There would be a lot fewer nix-1s and a lot more 3-3s. As it stands now, if two non-ranking schools hit, they get the leftovers, whereas what they might really want is a long-time coach or some really experienced parent. If you want those sort of judges to adjudicate your rounds, fine. Vote for them with your feet, so to speak. Sneering at MJP as the tool of the devil, on the other hand, simply relegates it to the position of the tool of your opponents. It is a useful control over practices you don’t like, whatever those practices may be.

So that’s the real issue here. At any given tournament, maybe a third to a half at most of the teams pref. MJP is better than all the alternatives in terms of the least biased and the most likely to favor competency. There is no inherency in MJP toward the Evils of Modern LD. But as long as most schools, through misguided philosophies, don’t pref, those who do will indeed call the shots, and move LD in whatever direction they prefer, with the judges they prefer. If you want to see LD go some other way, actively preffing judges that agree with you may be the most important thing you can do. (That, and getting your friends who agree with you who aren’t members of the VCA to do likewise.)