Wisconsin Forensics Daily

Monday Meditation: The Power of the Judge

It’s not until one becomes a coach that we realize the power the judge can possess. My first 5 years of involvement in debate included four years as a debater and one year as the exclusive coach of a varsity team. Now, as I’ve taken on the responsibilities and joys linked to teaching younger debaters, I’ve simultaneously come to realize the importance that many debaters place on a judge’s decision and opinion.

What does it mean to be a judge? Is there a “correct” or “incorrect” way to adjudicate? What can be done to address flaws in the current system? WFD would love to hear your answers to these essential questions. Sheboygan North coach Jon Voss begins the discussion in today’s Monday Meditation.

The Power of the Judge
Jonathan Voss, Sheboygan North

A debate judge judges a debate. This seems like an amazingly obvious concept, but further analysis shows that the way in which the critic judges the debate is of extreme importance. Simply put, a debate judge’s primary role is to adjudicate the round to the best of his or her ability—a proper evaluation of the debate is crucial to the activity’s educational value. However, many judges, especially those with comparatively less experience, forget that debaters (especially young ones) are particularly susceptible to judge-initiated feedback; that is to say, a positive relationship exists between the (in)experience of a debater and the “power” of a judge’s opinion. It stands to reason, then, that judges should use some degree of discretion when exerting their influence via a ballot or oral critique. Unfortunately, several recent trends brought to my attention by various debaters/coaches around the state should have every Wisconsin debate coach wondering if some judges are abusing/misusing their power.

“X Doesn’t Belong in Debate. Get Out”
While this command is usually articulated in a slightly less crass manner, I’ve nonetheless noticed that a few judges at ALL levels of debate seem to think they have the authority to determine what arguments and which debaters belong in our activity. Such a belief can only be described as absurd. Certainly, judges should always try to provide constructive criticisms—whether the criticism most directly relates to the debater, an argument or series of arguments, or both is really quite irrelevant so long as the suggestions are thoughtful, educational, and conducive to better debate.

Constructive judge-initiated criticism can often provide to the debater growth that s/he can’t obtain anywhere else; debate practices are often taken less seriously than “actual” rounds, and coaches can only offer limited advice if they weren’t able to observe the entire round. Judge advice provided through the ballot or an oral critique invariably offers a unique perspective on the arguments in the debate and the skills of the debaters simply because the judge’s role requires him/her to objectively evaluate the round. However, judges are only as helpful as they chose to be—that judges possess such powerful influence over debaters mean critics have the propensity to be more harmful than helpful.

Judges that write comments like (and all these have appeared on novice-level ballots or in oral critiques this year) “you should think about learning to read”, “this was the worst round I’ve ever seen”, “I really don’t know if you’re smart enough for this”, “why did you even bother to give your 2ar? You should just give it up when you know you’re losing”, and “you clearly don’t understand this argument; you should never run it again” do absolutely nothing to help our activity. Worse, comments like those above discourage overall involvement in debate—a judge’s influence ensures that debaters take such harmful comments to heart, and the perception that judges are elitist has the potential to preclude debaters from even trying the activity.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, every judge’s criticism of a round contains valuable bits of knowledge and ways in which the debaters can improve themselves or their arguments; but the way(s) in which a judge’s knowledge is articulated and interpreted might be more important than the knowledge itself. This is an especially important realization for judges that adjudicate rounds that involve young debaters. While most varsity-level debaters have developed skins thick enough to sustain belittling attacks, many novice and junior-varsity level debaters take harsh criticisms as a sign that they don’t belong in debate. While I think the majority of debate coaches would agree that certain debaters have more raw potential than others, success in debate isn’t necessarily important—even in the event that a given debater doesn’t win rounds very often, the act of participation provides arguably as much knowledge as measurable success in the activity.

Judge-initiated exclusionist attitudes, then, can be linked to two specific consequences—among others, cruelty undercuts retention rates and serves to disallow to high school students one of the most valuable forms of education they’ll ever receive.

Eleven of Thirty
Independent of their power and authority, judges have another tool available to them by which they can exert their influence—speaker points. To some extent, all judges possess a unique “speaker point threshold”; what I consider a “30 point performance” might be entirely different from one of my peer’s idea of perfection. These sorts of differences in speaker points are normal, and don’t undermine the educational value of debate.

But large discrepancies in the speaker point “norm” are an entirely different story. While every judge should be allowed to have his/her own “system” for assigning speaker points, a framework must be established wherein judges’ speaker point expectations are relatively similar. A couple of weekends ago, a particular First Affirmative Novice debater’s speaker points caught my eye—this person had received 63. In his/her first debate, the debater received 22 speaker points; in the second debate 30; in the final debate 11. Every debater has “good” rounds and “bad” rounds, but I would hazard to say that few debaters in the history of the activity have ever had such a drastic day. After receiving scores, this debater’s coach spent over two hours convincing the entire novice team that not all judges were as mean or belittling as the ones they had encountered that day—a judge’s use of an 11 had FOUR DEBATERS wanting to quit.

Put another way, I have a hard time believing that this debater had a round so bad that it warranted an 11; I don’t believe for a second that this debater debated so perfectly that s/he earned a 30; and because judges were assigning speaker points with such inconsistency, no one had any way of knowing what a 22 “meant”. A further analysis of results packets dating back to the 2004 WDCA State Tournament of Champions indicates that the aforementioned example isn’t uncommon. I think it’s fairly clear that a lack of speaker point consistency is problematic—arbitrarily assigning numbers without any framework to determine the meaning of a score disables a coach’s ability to know how well his/her students debated and prevents the debaters from knowing how they “stack up” against the rest of the competition. I’ll be the first to admit that this is a difficult problem to resolve; still, it’s not impossible.

While I would much prefer to hear the community’s ideas for improving this problem, I’ll offer a couple of potential solutions: we could include on our ballots “definitions” for certain scores, institute a very general WDCA “framework” for point allocation, and/or revamp the ballot box system in such a way that extreme inconsistency would be almost impossible.

Judges occupy an interesting and important position in the debate community—they determine wins and losses, speaker ranks, individual points, and sometimes even the ways we debate. More importantly, though, judges often occupy the role of an influential authority figure. While a judge’s power certainly has the potential to be productive and a source of education, critics also possess the ability to crush spirits and ward off the future of our activity. As a result of this power, judges need to realize (or be informed) that when writing ballots, assigning speaker points, or delivering decisions, discretion, tact, and fairness often mean the difference between a 4-year and 4-round debater. Perhaps the judge’s most important function in debate is to offer the type of constructive criticism designed to keep students involved in our wonderful activity.

Posted in Columns, Monday Meditation |