4 Week Tournament --- Guidelines

1. The purpose of the 4 Week Tournament is to provide students with an opportunity to participate in seven tournament-style preliminary debates plus relevant elimination rounds. It also provides students with an opportunity to debate against teams from other labs and to be critiqued by instructors with whom they might not otherwise interact. Students should continue to work with one another to create excellent, challenging debates. Students that do not comply with these requirements or that otherwise create an unproductive or hostile environment will be removed from the tournament.

2. Students may only utilize evidence that has been produced and released at camp on the official SDI wiki, but not all files released on the SDI wiki may be used. Students may only use files from 2019 SDI Dropbox under "4 Week Files," and the root "Evidence" folder. No evidence from any other sources (backfiles, 2 week files, other camps, personal files, original work, etc.) may be used.

3. Students may only utilize arguments contained in the files in the folders listed in #2. They may not create new positions or arguments (including by taking evidence from multiple files and combining it together unless explicitly authorized.) Plan, counterplan, and critique alternative texts may not be changed. If you are unsure about whether something is allowed or not, it is probably not allowed.

4. After the pairings for a given round are released, affirmative teams should immediately disclose the full text of their 1AC to the negative team they are debating. Negative teams should then ask the affirmative team if they would like the negative to disclose its off-case positions. If the affirmative requests disclosure, the negative team should tell the affirmative which off-case positions will be read (including the specific impact modules for disadvantages). If the affirmative would prefer that the negative not disclose their arguments so that they can better simulate the pressure of a tournament debate during the season, the negative should not disclose.

5. Debates involving two teams from the HSS labs may have less restrictive argument limits and different disclosure requirements. These will be shared by your instructors. Debates involving one HSS team and one non-HSS team will follow the general requirements detailed above.