Judging Requirements

Teams should bring one qualified judge for every 3 LDers, PF teams, or Parliamentary teams; every 2 Policy teams, and every 5 Speech entries, rounded up in the case of fractional obligations. Teams with Congress entries must bring 1 Congress judge. You may not cover VLD entries with JV-only judges. Congress judges may be swapped into another judging pool; please indicate which other pool a Congress judge would like to judge if we cannot use him/her in Congress when registering. Likewise, qualified Speech judges may also be asked to judge Congress. Judges in all divisions are obligated to stay and judge one round past any round in which their students are actively competing. We will assume judges are staying past their obligation unless we hear otherwise: let us know if you are leaving.

Keep in mind that a “qualified judge” understands the activity, speaks English, and is either experienced sitting in the back of the room with a ballot or flow pad as the case may be, or else has been carefully trained by the team he or she is accompanying. A qualified judge knows how to assign ranks or wins/losses, speaker points, and knows how to fill out a ballot. Please do not try to sneak in an untrained ringer. When you provide an incompetent judge, we usually find out about it only after a number of competitors have been, in a word, shafted, while you have been basking in the glow of judging by trained or experienced judges. This does not respect us, or the community, very much at all. We’ll likely respond in kind.

We’re also committed to hiring a quality pool of judging in all divisions. However, given the relatively small number of judges in the immediate New Haven area, bringing this pool to Yale is both complex and expensive. To aid us in that effort, the registration system will ask you to explicitly request judge hires. Please request early; we will not harm the quality of our tournament by oversubscribing hired judging as certain other tournaments do. Judges dropped after registration is frozen on September 21st, even if you drop students to compensate, will incur a fee you will not want to pay. Similarly, if you add a judge after September 19th, you still have to pay for the hireds you signed up for, unless someone else should need a last-minute hire, since we’ll be paying that judge either way.

We charge for hired judges by the student, not by the whole judge.    So if you have 7 IE students entered, and only 1 judge covering 5 of those students, you owe two hired judging fees. This system is more fair because it does not require you to hire a whole judge just to cover a fractional obligation. Speech or Congress hired judges cost $50 per entry they cover (If you have 12 entries and 2 judges, your hired judge costs $100. Congress judging carries a maximum charge of 5 entries; you do not need to hire for entries beyond your first 5). LD and PF hires cost $90.00 per covered entry. (We pay these judges more for judging Friday night too). Policy debate hires cost $125.00 per covered entry. Parliamentary debate judges cost $90.

Partial fees will also apply for your judges who are only available for part of the tournament, since we cover these slots with judging. If you can bring extra judges, we’ll credit your registration fees. Please email us first: don’t assume you can do this without contacting us.

We’ll also be asking for judge cell numbers on registration, if you have them. Please collect as many as you can from your judges. Keep in mind that the more judge cell numbers you register, the fewer times we’ll be calling you to find your judges. Schools whose judges fail to appear for an assigned round will be fined $25 for a prelim or $50 for an elim round. Judges fined may work it off by judging rounds beyond their assignment. We don’t want your money, we want judges to show up. However, schools with unpaid fines will not be given ballots or awards, and will be prevented from registering at other tournaments we run (and that’s a lot of them) until those fines are paid.

LD Mutually-Preferred Judging

 

Yale will again be using Mutually-Preferred Judging in LD Debate.  Each debater in the Varsity division, provided their judging obligation is covered, will be able to rank all judges from 1-6 (6 being a strike), with limited numbers of judges being rated a 2-6. You can rank as many judges as you like as 1.    As we tab, we will attempt to give debaters judges they both rated 1, or debaters they both rated 2, and so on; at the very least, we will minimize the “distance” between the two preferences. However, debaters with more than 2 losses will not clear; therefore, mutually preferred judging will give way somewhat in those brackets to allow the best and fairest use of our judging pool.

Because of numerous past shenanigans, and tab staff running itself ragged trying to deal with them, WE WILL ONLY ACCEPT MPJ RATINGS ONLINE. There will be NO strike sheets or rating sheets handed in at the registration table. If you hand in a paper ratings sheet, we will smile and thank you, and promptly throw it into the recycle bin.

MJP ratings will be available on tabroom.com on Tuesday before the tournament; they will close Friday morning at 10 AM. If you’re not getting a strike option when you go into your online registration, it means your judging obligation was not covered.

Judges and debaters are asked to provide us in advance with notice of any conflicts (special relationships, former affiliation with the team/school, etc.). We will handle conflicts separately from strikes.

Furthermore, the judging you bring needs to be the judging you registered online by the deadline. Substituting another judge in a rated pool isn’t good enough; people have rated your old judge, not your new judge. Schools that change their judges after online MPJ ratings have begun will LOSE ALL THEIR MPJ RATINGS. Do not bother to bring judges unregistered by the deadline; they are useless to the tournament. If you have a judge who’s stricken terribly ill and cannot come, you will have to pay the dropped judge fee to keep your ratings, because we will not be changing around the judge pool at the last minute. Again. Palmer, Menick & Vaughan have heard too many sob stories than is plausible on this front; get your registration right and you won’t have any problems.

Paradigms

LD judges should post paradigms at http://judgephilosophies.wikispaces.com/ to enable best use of MJP. Other judges may or may not publish paradigms as they see fit, although we urge them to do so, but in either case, they should be willing to indicate to competitors before a round a general sense of their vision of debate (if any) or a sense of their experience, to aid competitors in choosing how best to make their arguments. Judges publishing paradigms will likely be rated higher, and see better rounds, than those who do not. Be warned. If you have a published paradigm, please send us the text or a link in your registration or by email to yale@tabroom.com so we can collate them for the competitors.