Judge Procedures Merge "Grading" and "Preference" at 15th All Asians in Bangladesh

From Alfred Snider:

Hello. I am coordinating the tabulation of the upcoming 15th All Asians Inter Varsity Debating Championship that will be held in Bangladesh. I wanted to share with you some of our plans for judging at the tournament.

We will be having a judge training session, then a sample debate, then a test then and finally an evaluation of the oral adjudication skills of all judges at the tournament. They will be individually interviewed by one of our extremely experienced judges and their oral critique of the sample debate they watched will be evaluated. This information will be used by the Adjudication Core for use later in ranking that judge.

We will also be using mutual preference information in making our judge assignments. This is a computer assisted system and I will be arranging it and coordinating it. Judges will be asked to put on file a judge philosophy statement that will show each judge’s experience as well as their comments about preferences and particularities of their judging. All teams will be asked to look at this material by the start of the tournament. I will produce a form that has all of the judges on it. You cross out your own judges, and then you rate the other judges as (A) you really like them and want them, (B) you like them but they are not your real favorites, (C) you do not really prefer them but they could judge you, and (S) you do not want these judges under any condition and would therefore STRIKE them from hearing you.

This information will be put into the computer and used as part of Dr. Rich Edwards’ system TAB ROOM FOR THE PC that will be used during the tournament. I have the pleasure of making sure this program works. Dr. Edwards and I have worked together with another tab program he produced to do the National Forensic League’s national championship speech and debate tournament in the USA, which has 13 different events and over 5000 people involved. I trust his software and know that it works. I have personally used TRPC at many, many tournaments both in the USA and internationally.

This data will be evaluated along with the test results and the subsequent rankings. This way we can make sure that each debate has a judge that the Adjudication Core thinks is good and that the teams think is good. This system should enable us to produce judge assignments that feature high quality as well as preferred status. Let’s say that there is Judge A whom the Adjudication Core thinks is fine but your team things is terrible. Using this system we can avoid a judge placement that would be unpopular with one of the teams, and thus substitute a Judge B that the Adjudication Core thinks is excellent AND that both teams in the debate believes is excellent as well.

I think this is an exciting new development in judge assignment and I am looking forward to being part of it.

If you are curious about my experience, please feel free to download by prose vita at http://debate.uvm.edu/acsprosevita.doc .

See you in Bangladesh!

Tuna

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Alfred C. Snider aka Tuna
Edwin Lawrence Professor of Forensics
University of Vermont
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