Toward a meaningful discussion of MJP

I have posted the following to the NDCA discussion group. I will keep you apprised of the situation here.

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The note Stefan posted about Wake Forest is not the only piece published recently about MJP, although it’s certainly the most disturbing. [The issue was racism in college level debate.] But even setting aside those disturbing aspects, there is no question that MJP, in and of itself, is also having meaningful effects on tournaments at the high school level. These effects need to be discussed. I will be speaking here directly to how MJP has affected LD, but I would imagine that there are comparable issues in Policy.

First of all, we should understand the philosophy of preffing. The purpose of ranking judges, regardless of who does the ranking, is to be able to designate which are the strongest judges to put into the most important rounds. This makes sense when a competition is at stake. The alternative to this would be totally random judging, which is incongruent with the competitive nature of debate.

When I started tabbing well over a decade ago, the judges were ranked by the tab room; this meant that the sorting of who were the strongest judges was in the hands of tournament staff. The problem here is that the tab room’s idea of the strongest judges might not be the same as everyone at the tournament. Nor does everyone at the tournament agree. MJP moved the determination of the strongest judges from the tab room to the individual teams themselves. This seems to make sense. If you want your toughest rounds to be adjudicated by the best possible judges, you no doubt have your own idea who those best possible judges are.

Originally when we began implementing MJP, only a handful of circuit schools preffed, which meant that they almost always got their 1s, and their opponents who hadn’t preffed were judged by default by the 1s of those who did. The advantage to the preffing schools was obvious: they inevitably got their most favored judges. In an ongoing process, I’ve been educating the non-preffing schools at tournaments I tab, explaining the benefits of their preffing and the harms of their not doing so. I “sell” MJP to the non-preffers before every tournament with a letter of explanation (www.jimmenick.com/bump/MJP_letter.pdf). Additionally, I usually have coaches rank their judges as Circuit, Traditional or New when they enter their names into the system, to alleviate the need for non-circuit teams to comb over the paradigms, which many find onerous. As time has gone by, more and more teams are using prefs at tournaments. I can imagine a time shortly in the future when virtually all teams will pref.

In a world where everyone prefs, things will be much different from when only some schools pref, and we’re already beginning to see this happening. The pairings that put the 1 of the preffing school vs the blank of the non-preffing school will disappear. And, of course, it is likely that non-circuit schools will not rank similarly to circuit schools; all the circuit schools already don’t rank exactly the same, although they do in general prefer a certain sort of judge. In other words, as everyone prefs, it’s going to harder to find enough 1-1s to go around, and perhaps even 2-2s.

There seems to be a belief on the part of many teams that MJP means that they will get 1-1 mutuality in all rounds, or at worst, 2-2, in pools where they’ve ranked from 1 to 5 plus strikes. The idea that they would get less than a 2-2 is, to them, unacceptable. At the point where a judge is less than 2-2, these teams want to throw mutuality out of the window and ask for 1-2s, even if they’re against their side. And here’s why that is a bad belief: If prefs were set up evenly across 5 levels, plus a few strikes, the resistance to anything less than a 2 means that teams are effectively striking 60% of the field. Is that really our goal with MJP? Our problems in the high school community are not the same as college debate (at least I hope not), but unquestionably this attitude of refusing anything less than a 2, if allowed to prevail, will have unacceptable results. Throwing mutuality out the window the minute the choice is not one of the top choices is an attempt to manipulate judge pools that seems, on face, far from educational. If more people pref, the likelihood is that fewer 1-1s and 2-2s will be available. If we toss mutuality at that point, we are virtually guaranteeing a ghettoization of a sizeable portion of the judge pool. Prefs already have begun to work this way, resulting in some judges almost never getting rounds. Given that the average judge pool comprises people we need to have around, the idea that we would put them in the pool and never use them under almost any circumstances, almost certainly eventually results in their no longer showing up, be they young coaches from unknown programs who will go back to the unknown, or older coaches who can spend just so much time in a judge lounge grading papers, or parents acting as chaperones who would be fine with low-pressure rounds below the bubble but who never judge, ever! Excluding these people from rounds insures their continued exclusion as they never learn by doing. Sticking to mutuality does not completely alleviate this ghettoization, but as more people pref, sticking to mutuality does bring a greater number of people into the rounds. Yes, this will force debaters to adapt to judges who may not be the ones they prefer to debate in front of, but a debater who can only pick up rounds from a severely limited pool is a severely limited debater, and one we to whom have not successfully taught the skills of public speaking. And, of course, their opponent, in a world of mutuality, is in the same boat.

I think we need a set of best practices in MJP. We need to look at the following:

1 Do we truly enforce it in every pairing, and what are the results either way?

2 How should prefs be set up? Should there be different numbers of ranks for different-sized tournaments, for instance a set of 3 for a small tournament and a set of 5 for a big tournament? Should there also be strikes when there’s prefs? Should the allowed percentages of each rank be identical, with a default of unlimited 1s? A shrinking scale?

3 In tab, what’s the best way to use prefs? Always try for highest in each round, working up from the bubble and then down from it in bracketed rounds? Should lower prefs be used in presets to preserve higher prefs in later rounds? Should standards be set up in break rounds that assure mutuality beyond merely adding numbers (i.e., where a 1-3, a 4-1 and a 1-2, which adds up equally to 6 but seems to give strong preference to the side with two 1s)?

4 At most HS tournaments there are 5 or 6 prelims. The same mathematical pressures that ghettoize the least preferred judges put the most preferred judges in literally every one of those rounds. Should we give every judge regardless of preference a designated round off? The impact on getting the most preferred judges would be a strong one. This raises the question of whether, indeed, judges need rounds off? Are we overworking some of the judges? Or is spending the day doing the job of judging without a round off an acceptable burden?

5 A possible idea might be to stop following prefs when a team is out of contention for elims. This allows tab to find the underused judges in later rounds and give them something to do, but on the one hand, it insures that the least preferred judges always get the least desirable rounds, and second, the worst debater in the field paid exactly the same fees as the best debater and therefore might be due an equal access to the best judges throughout the tournament. (Then again, from a Rawlsian perspective, all debaters might agree in advance from behind a V of I that the exigencies of the competition warrant using the highly preffed judges only for in-the-running teams, and if using the least preferred judges in non-in-the-running teams provides an overall benefit, this would be acceptable.)

6 Comparable to dealing with teams out of competition, there is also the issue of dealing with teams beyond the competition, i.e., the 5-0 debaters going into round 6. Teams need to realize that by the time we get to that bracket, we have probably run out of your best match (and the word “match” is a good one to remember, because the goal of MJP is to give you your best match). But there’s other things to think about. Would we be better off to give the down-3s their top match, in aid of the educational goals of the activity, and go up to the undefeateds later? Maybe this helps us understand that underlying question: are we in it for the winning of as many competitions as possible at any cost?

At the point where every tournament is different, expectations are confused at best. If the teams get to toss MJP at the moment it no longer appeals to them, it really isn’t MJP anymore. If we wish to toss MJP altogether in favor of some other process, fine. But at the moment, MJP is going to be the standard at more and more high school LD tournaments, and is preferable to tab rooms doing the preffing. We need to polish MJP so that it is working as best it can. Teams that have been getting their way with endless 1s will have to learn that that won’t happen anymore. Teams that always seem to get unsympathetic judges because they weren’t preffing will find, maybe not sympathy but an equal portion of dis-sympathy as their opponent. In any case, a standardized approach to running tournaments has to be to everyone’s benefit. Discussion among this group seems to be a good way of achieving that standardization.