Judge Training Feature
One of the reasons I’m really liking this topic is the opportunity we have this year to really branch out with our judging pools. I’d be remiss to not mention the fact that I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Dr. Kasle at Riverside who was able to arrange for an excellent presentation from the Federal Highway Administration at the RCC camp back in August which was a great benefit to all the participants.
Transportation is such a huge area of our economy that there are transportation people all over the place that we may be able to convince to come out and judge some rounds. With a half hour’s drive of Mt. SAC (for Fall Champs) or Cerritos (for the SoCal LD Champs) we could probably find at least 100-200 people involved with transportation. If we could even get 10% of the people to come judge a round or two that would be 10-20 rounds judged by experts in the field. I’m thinking people involved in local, state, and national transportation departments. Immediately after college I worked for the City of Torrance in the Transit Department. I’m picturing the director of that office coming out to judge a few rounds.
These people would likely be experts in their area of study but certainly not experts on judging NFA-LD debate. So I thought it may be helpful to dedicate a portion of this website as an introduction to judging the event site. I saw that Whitman does something similar and the Middle School Public Debate Program has a great ballot writing site.
I’m picturing something that would try to achieve three main goals:
- Introduce NFA-LD Event Basics
- Introduce NFA-LD Judging Basics
- Introduce Tournament Basics
NFA-LD Event Basics
Familiarize the potential judges with the event, the time limits, cross-examination, the single topic, the emphasis on research, and the expectation that the debater’s should persuasively communicate with the audience.
NFA-LD Judging Basics
Familiarize the potential judges with the stock issues paradigm, presumption, the use and clash of evidence, the role of the judge as time keeper, speaker points, writing out ballots, and single judge round versus panels in elims.
Tournament Basics
Explain how a standard tournament works with ballots, teams, rooms, different rounds, prelims v. elims, tie breakers, and elimination round procedures.
I was hoping this could be a bit of a collaborative process so if you are interested in adding something please let me know in the comments section. Right now I’m just looking to flesh out the ideas and figure out what should be included. Once we have a good working outline perhaps we could have volunteers to write up the section and send it to me.
What do you think we should include? Why?
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Comments
yeah, i would be a little afraid to run some of my args because my case is based on the idea the usfg is one giant @$$#013…
I think nick has a good idea with the panel.
Besides, we don’t wana scare these poor people and give to much emersion into 4n6… might not go over so well, lol
I think it might be a good idea to put the whole thing up on Google Sites (or something similar), and then add whoever asks as a collaborator. I’d be happy to work on it.
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Topic experts seem cool but I think most debaters would prefer to debate in front of more traditional critics who can give comprehensive post-round RFDs.
I think a good compromise would be to invite a panel of 5 or so to adjudicate over the final round of Fall Champs. I know that College Prep School does this for their annual high school round robin and has had positive reviews. You would just need to make sure you had a diverse range of backgrounds (i.e. not just highway folks). That would also reduce the time commitment for them and ensure a high quality debate through Darwinian means.