Me as a debate judge

So last Friday, I was one of three judges for a small private school debate competition. One of the reasons, I wanted to be debate judge was to get a better handle on what the judges are looking for, so that I will know how to prepare my students for their upcoming debate competitions.

One of the take aways I got is that it is possible for the judges to watch the same debate and come away with fairly divergent reactions. This is a little troubling because in the regional rounds its the two teams with the highest scores that proceed -- meaning that is possible to win both of your regional debates and still not proceed to the next round. However, for my school its not a problem because we will automatically advance to the national round since we were the national champions last year.

My other take away was that the students should be very dramatic when they are speaking perhaps even over acting a little bit. Both in this competition and in the speaking competitions the winners were the team that should the most emotion.

After the competition, I had a respectful talk with one of the teams who disagreed with the judges ruling and wanted to know why we ruled as we did. They had a decent reason to be upset, they had actually made a really good argument that all of the judges missed. But the reason all the judges missed it is that it wasn't well presented, the impacts of the argument weren't mentioned, and they didn't repeat the argument at all in the rest of the speeches. My lesson from this is to be careful, just because you make an argument does not mean that the argument was heard/understood.