JUDGING

Role of the judge

Debating is a competition and the role of the adjudicator is to:

Act as the match official – ensuring the rules of the competition are followed.

Sometimes they will be assisted in this task by a chairperson and/or timekeeper, but it is ultimately the judge’s duty to keep order.

Determine the winner of the debate and assign points – debating relies on the determination of an independent judge to decide who wins a round.

Provide feedback – adjudicators in debating are expected to provide detailed feedback to the teams after each round. This reflects debating’s diverse perspectives, and the expertise of the judges.

The characteristics of a good judge are:

Impartial and unbiased – not judging teams based on who they are or what side of a topic they have been allocated.

Observant and detached – willing to listen carefully to what is said during the debate, and not inserting their own views and analysis into the debate.

Aware – possesses a basic knowledge of current affairs, but not to the extent their own specialist knowledge interferes with their assessment debate.

Constructive – recognises that debating should be fun, that teams always deserve respect, and that every result (win or loss) is an opportunity for the speakers to learn.

THE PROCESS OF JUDGING

Refereeing The Match

Judges are responsible for enforcing order, as per the rules of each debate format. For WSDC style this means:

1. Ensuring that speakers keep to the allotted time – 5 minutes for main speeches and 4 minutes for replies. After a 15 second grace period, speakers should receive clear time signals (e.g., a bell or claps) to indicate they need to end their speech.

2. Recognising the current speaker’s control of the floor – reminding speakers to not offer POIs during the first and last minutes of main speeches, and intervening if a POI significantly exceeds the allowed 15 seconds or if the offeror begins to engage in a back-and-forth with the speaker.

3. Maintaining decorum by intervening if someone in the debate (or in the audience) is disruptive (e.g., talking over the current speaker, bullying behaviour etc).

Deciding Who Won The Debate

When deciding who won, judges should think about the teams holistically – they shouldn’t simply assess each speaker in a vacuum and tally-up the total speaker points of each team.

Explaining The Result and Giving Feedback

After deciding who won the debate, and completing their score sheet (ballot) judges need to explain the result and the reasons for the decision (through an oral adjudication), and give feedback to the teams.

When giving an oral adjudication, judges should briefly describe what happened in the debate (focusing on the key issues/cruxes of the debate important for the outcome) and how the judge(s) weighed them. Save commentary on what could be improved for feedback – debaters will become confused if, for example, judges begin to explain an alternative argument they could have made while still giving the oral adjudication.

Oral adjudications should be short (aim for 5 minutes), focussed on the key issues, the contributions of each team to each issue, and an explanation about why the judges saw each issue fall the way it did. While not mandatory, it is good practice to announce the result before explaining the reasons, as this will make the adjudication easier to explain (as you won’t be trying to obscure the result to maintain tension).

judgıng tıps

KEY THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

The exact wording of the topic is not important. As long as the definition is reasonable, the debate is about what the affirmative set it up to be about.

Sometimes a definition is unreasonable – it does ‘violence to the wording of the motion’. For example, by being unfairly limited to extreme or self-serving examples, or a complete non sequitur. This is sometimes referred to as ‘squirrel’.

If there is a squirrel, the debate continues. The negative team should, early on in their first speech, point out the unfairness of the definition. From that point on, however, they need to change their case to address it. In nearly all cases the negative team will enjoy a significant advantage, because the squirreled definition usually leads to a trivial or unpersuasive affirmative case. There is no need to further penalise the affirmative team.

There is no right style for a speaker to use. Speaking with an accent is not bad style – everyone has an accent. Part of debating is getting good at listening to people from a range of backgrounds and nationalities.

This is not to say that style is unimportant. Far from it – clear, compelling and confident style can tremendously enhance the quality of the arguments presented. Style and content are given equal weighting on the ballot, and your assessment of each speaker should reflect this.

One of the most difficult parts of judging debates is correctly recognising the different weights of arguments, and how competing arguments interact within issues. Don’t think of debates or points like they’re on a set of scales. Winning two points of clash, but losing a third, doesn’t necessarily win a team a debate. Think of it more like a tug of war. Did this point take the affirmative team over the line, or did the negative team pull it back?

Some points don’t need to be simply won or lost. Imagine that the affirmative needs to prove that there is a moral duty to do something. The negative might raise reasonable doubt and ‘parry’ that point, but at the end of the debate we’re not sure overall, or the point is drawn. However, if establishing the moral duty was critical to the affirmative team’s case (for example, because they argued that practical outcomes should be ignored in favour of the moral duty), this draw could be enough for them to lose the debate overall.

Equally, losing some points can mean that other contingent arguments can’t come into play. For example, they may have proven that a given change would result in three benefits, but they also need to have proven that that change would actually occur as a consequence of implementing the motion.

TIPS AND TRICKS

Feel comfortable rewarding a first affirmative speaker for saying things that the negative are never going to disagree with, but which are important to setting up a good debate. For example, even if both teams ultimately agree that a given right or duty is important, the first affirmative may have done good work establishing this in a way that makes the negative team’s concession or agreement more costly.

In some debates there might truly be just one point upon which the debate turns. If so, there is no need to generate two more to reach an imagined target.

Feel free to do it your own way. Some write very few notes, some take a very long time to decide, some use different coloured pens, and some use just one sheet of paper.

Don’t insert yourself in the debate (for example, by rejecting an argument because of personal taste or specialist knowledge). However, if an argument plainly wouldn’t make sense to the average reasonable person, it isn’t persuasive. Similarly, the average reasonable person will notice if an argument addresses the opposition’s case whether or not teams point out that it has that effect. Genuine contradictions should similarly be penalised, even if not pointed out by the other team (although the other team may be rewarded for doing a good job of explaining the contradiction).

GIVING AN ORAL ADJUDICATION

An oral adjudication is difficult to give. Judges are assessed just like debaters and, like a debater, your oral adjudication has to have authority, clear and compelling language, good pace, and all of the persuasiveness we expect from a speaker.

Don’t be arrogant and disrespectful to teams.

Don’t be overly lengthy in adjudication. The debaters know what their points were, and they don’t really need to be reminded about the minor or obvious ones. The bulk of what you say needs to be an assessment of the debate, not a summary.

On the other hand, don’t be too quick to dismiss things either if it was clearly important to one or both teams. An irrelevant point, if one team thought it critical, will need to be briefly addressed to convince that team of its irrelevance.

The debate will have evolved and likely moved away from the specific clash the debaters expected or wanted. You don’t have to assess the debate using the framework or structure of the points the first speakers set out, and probably won’t do that very often.

See resource: https://www.debating.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/NZ-Schools-Debating-How-to-Judge-Guide.pdf