 Imagine attending your first figure skating competition, you've been training on your jumps and rotations, mastering your half-lets and axle, and you're feeling pretty confident. The music begins and you perform to the best of your abilities, doing everything you were taught in lessons. Then the judging comes through, and the marks are low. Disappointed, you go to ask the three judges for more feedback. You enter the room and it turns out that your first judge is someone you recognize, a novice who has attended your skating class for less time than you and wasn't selected for the competition. The second judge, a friend of the woman who runs the rink and has never seen skating before, but said she would help out. The third is an experienced skater who had a big fight with your coach five years ago. Are you any less disappointed by your low scores? Have you truly learned anything about your skating skills and abilities? The biggest criticism of debate judging is that, at its worst, it offers debaters experiences like those of our imaginary skater. Anyone who has been debating for a few years will have a story to tell about a debate where the judges got it wrong, according to the teams in the room. But what is remarkable when you consider how subjective persuasion can be is not how widespread these tales of injustice are, but how rare a tiny portion of the results of competitive debates are officially challenged by debaters. Through a stable body of rules, judge tests, trainings, and feedback over long periods, the debate community has managed to bring the subjective judgment of judicators closer together. Today we will cover the basics of judging in debate. We will discuss the common types of judges in paradigms, look at the process for fairly evaluating a debate round, before finally walking you through the process of filling out a ballot. In debate, you're going to find yourself arguing in front of a lot of different types of folks. Let's start with some of the common types of judges. Generally speaking, you were likely to run into three types of judges in competitive debate, flow judges, comms judges, and lay judges. Understanding these three categories can be useful, but be warned that overgeneralizing also causes trouble when it comes time to adapt. First, the flow judge. Flow judges preference the line by line on their flow sheets. This means you can typically speak a little faster in front of them, but focus on your organizational pattern. Making sure to give both organized roadmaps before you start and signposting constantly during your speech will be critical. Most flow judges also make efforts to protect the flow. This means that they may choose not to flow or may even disregard new arguments made in the final rebuttals. Second is the comms judge. Comms judges preference delivery and persuasiveness in their evaluations. When debating in front of a comms judge, it is important to bring up fewer arguments and make sure to speak slow and clear. Comms judges take a more holistic view of evaluating rounds, but this does not mean that you can just abandon the line by line of the flow. Try to balance working through the arguments while putting an emphasis on persuasiveness. The last major category of judge is called the lay judge. Lay judges by definition are individuals who have no experience participating or judging debate. In competitive debate, lay judges can be somewhat common. In fact, the IPDA style of debate actively encourages the use of lay judges to ensure that the event does not get overly fast and technical. When debating in front of a lay judge, there are a couple of things that you can do to adapt. First, avoid overly complicated argumentative strategies. Procedural arguments or critiques will likely be met with more confusion than understanding. Next, try to split ideas up into smaller, more manageable components. Next, try to emphasize the reasons why you are winning. It will be less obvious on the flow of a lay judge that you are upholding your burden in the round. To be honest, most lay judges will take notes on key arguments opposed to flowing the debate. Try to focus on making offensive arguments if possible. Next, make sure to roadmap and signpost a lot. This repetition will help the lay judge manage the arguments, particularly if they are not flowing the debate. Last, try to connect your arguments back to the ballot. It's pretty easy for debaters to overwhelm a lay judge. If you clearly explain why each argument you make is a reason that they should vote for you, then you would make it easier for them to do so. Debating in front of lay judges can be challenging, but the good news is that folks do not remain lay judges for very long. In fact, by watching this video, you have taken the first step towards becoming one of the first two types. In addition to the three types of judges, you will also discover that judges tend to develop a paradigm over time. In debate, a paradigm is an overarching theory about what a fair debate round should look like. Many tournaments request or even require judges to provide a written paradigm before the round begins. If you plan to judge debates, you should consider writing one yourself. If a judge does not have a written paradigm, it's common for debaters to ask general questions about them before the round begins. Knowing your judge's preferences can be extremely helpful when it comes to adapting to their preferences. Now that we've covered a bit of the background on judging debates, let's talk about some of the important guidelines that judges need to follow. Since you're watching this video, I'm going to assume that you want to be an ethical and qualified critic. There are a couple of things that you can do to help accomplish this. First, make sure to respect the debaters that you watch. While I'm the first to admit that debate is just a game, it's one that competitors have poured a lot of their time and energy into. Having control of the ballot gives you some power. Be fair how you exercise it. Try to keep an upbeat attitude. Remember that the only instance in which you should interrupt the debaters is if they go over the time limits. I find that setting an audible timer to go off at the end of the speech does the trick. When the debate is done, make sure to provide some meaningful feedback. This should always get written on the ballot. Make sure that you also include a well-informed reason for a decision. It is your ethical responsibility as a judge to explain how you arrived at your decision. Once the ballot is filled out and if the tournament allows it, you should also be ready to share your feedback and decision with the debaters. Second, it is important to leave your own bias out of the decision-making process. In debate, the competitors have little control over what side of the issues they debate. Their job is to present the best possible arguments for the side of the topic they were assigned. Your job is to decide which team debated better, not which team happened to cater to your pre-existing opinions about the topic. When you are asked to judge a debate, you need to attempt to be as impartial as possible. This means to evaluate the round you witnessed. This means no matter how much you disagree with a debater's argument, if their opponent mishandles it, then you must give it the full weight in the debate. Remember, it's a game, but if you vote for a debater who is not winning an argument, then you are harming the fairness of the activity. Third, you should evaluate rounds based on hierarchy. In a debate round, there are certain types of arguments that must be evaluated prior to others. If the round you watch contains theory or framework arguments, then those must be decided before the substantive issues of the debate. This is because theory and framework arguments center on the fairness of the debate. It would be unjust to award a win to an affirmative team who was not following the resolution but had bigger impacts on their advantage. Evaluate procedural arguments like topicality first, then, if you can get past them on the flow, move on to the substantive arguments of the debate. Last, make sure you follow the debater's criteria for evaluating the debate. For example, in most policy-based debates, you may hear debaters argue that the round should be evaluated through the lens of net benefits. If both teams agree to that criteria, then it means you need to look at your flow at the end of the debate and see if the affirmative team has proven that the good of their plan would outweigh the net detriments and leave the status quo better off. If, at the end of the round, it seems like the status quo is the same or would be worse, then you would have to vote for the negation. Occasionally, you may find yourself watching the debate where neither team has provided a criteria. If this happens, then you must intervene and judge the round. This is a weak form of judge intervention, but the debaters have left you with no other choice. Try to be as fair as possible. Now that we've discussed some considerations of being a judge, let's look at how you would accomplish it in an actual round. Before the round, when you get your judging assignment, be sure you know the specific event you are judging and where the room is located for that event. Ask any questions that you may have about the event to the coach or sponsor who brought you, a tournament official or another veteran judge. Go promptly to your room assignment and be sure to start on time with the correct students assigned to your room. If you are judging with more than one person, be sure not to start the round until all judges are present. Be sure to ask the tournament staff if you are judging as part of a panel or if you will be the only judge in the room prior to the start of the round. During the round, it's imperative that you give the debaters your undivided attention. Please silence your cell phone and instruct any audience members to do the same. You should actively listen and keep time, following the time limits. Use the ballot provided to write your comments and remember that your feedback will be read by students, their coaches, and is often shared with fellow teammates or other contestants. Comments should be constructive in nature and help the debaters understand your thoughts as their judge. During the round, you should keep track of the major arguments by flowing the debate. Keeping an accurate flow of the debate is really the only ethical way to evaluate the arguments at the end of the round. Once the round is ended, you will determine the winner. A winning debater would have done a better job articulating their position and refuting their opponent's arguments. Consider the major arguments in the round and how they were refuted. Which argument or arguments do you feel were established throughout the debate most completely and convincingly? Make sure that you provide this information when writing your reason for decision on your ballot. Different tournaments use different ballots. At some tournaments, the ballots may be provided to you as a sheet of paper. At other tournaments, you may be asked to pull up a website to enter your ballot electronically. Regardless of the modality, ballots tend to ask judges to fill out a couple of key things. First, make sure to provide any round information asked. This typically includes the round number, the debater's names, and the sides, your name and affiliation, as well as the resolution being debated. At the end of the round, you will need to indicate which team won the debate. This is either done by circling the winner or checking the correct box or drop-down option. Next, you will need to provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Most ballots will ask you to provide a rank and speaker point score for your debaters. Ranking means giving the best debater the one and the next best debater the two, and so on, until you've ranked every debater in the round. Speaker points are a quantification of how well debaters spoke in the round. Most ballots will provide an explanation and limits for what speaker points should be. This is a common rubric used in NFALD and NPDA styles of debate, where scores tend to range in between 1 and 30. In IPDA style debate, the following guide is provided to help judges calculate a score out of 40. Some tournaments have speaker points that go up to 100, so make sure that you are following the directions on the ballots. Next is the qualitative portion of the ballot. Here you should seek to leave some constructive feedback to all of the debaters in the round. Make sure that you try to be encouraging in this process. The final part of the ballot is the reason for decision, usually called the RFD. This is where you need to provide a reason via the criteria of the round why you voted the way that you did. This is a good opportunity to make sure that you are fairly evaluating the debate. RFDs should be specific and reference the content of the debate. It's not acceptable to simply say that you thought one team debated better without explaining why. Judging is a critical part of the debate activity. It's important to take the process seriously and do your part to help the debaters improve. Today, we went over the basics of judging and debate. We discussed the different types of debate judges, looked at some of the key responsibilities in judging, before finally covering how to fill out a ballot. Debating may be a long cry from figure skating, but getting a fair win can be pretty rewarding regardless of the type of competition. Thanks for watching. This video series is written and produced by me, Ryan Guy, with the help of a wide variety of scholarly research and open educational resources. A special thanks to Neil Harvey Smith, whose 2000 work gave me the attention-gitter for this video. For more information on the references and materials used, see the description page on YouTube. This video is published under a Creative Commons license. Please feel free to share, use, and remix its content.