Thursday Thing to Read: Against Good Judges
September 28, 2006 – 4:07 am by: Nick BubbThe first Thursday Thing to Read is written by Nicolet Debate Coach Jason Chapman. Often times we assume that more experienced judges are better for debate because they are used to how a debate works. Jason's article questions whether or not our preconcieved notions of debate from good judges really advances debate. It's pretty interesting. Read on, in:
Why Good Judges Are Bad
by Jason Chapman
I am the type of judge many debaters love; I am a tabs judge, speed makes me happy, I like Kritiks and I love a good theory debate. I know the theory behind Intrinsicness responses and I can tell you the origins of the K. I can explain why Non-Uniqueness response beat DA’s and I can defend everything from Conditional Counter-Plans to Performance Affs and Severance Perms. Yet, really at the end of the day, what good does any of this do me as a judge?
As I begin to plan training sessions for new judges, I have started to wonder if I really am the best kind of judge. New judges often don’t know very much about debate. They have probably been introduced to the Stocks but almost certainly haven’t had the interaction between Inherency and DA’s explained. Even if they have a basic knowledge of DA’s, they probably don’t understand why a team going for a Link Turn wants to win that the DA is Non-Unique. I won’t even get into Kritiks or Perms. But what if this lack of knowledge, once communicated, makes the debates better?
For example, one potential judge was wondering what to do if she didn’t understand an issue in the round. My response was to write on the ballot that she couldn’t vote on that issue because the team had not been able to explain the issue clearly and to specify which points caused her confusion. I think that we can all agree that teams should be able to explain their points; after all, communication is a part of the activity.
I know that from my perspective, I am sick of blippy 25-point responses to “T is a time suck” arguments. I wonder where is the clash and how can I vote for an argument which is, in its complete form including all warrants, “fairness.” I love theory debates because I love the complex reasons behind why debate is a certain way and what debate should be. These warrantless responses always leave me bewildered trying to determine if I vote Neg because 20 of the 25 points were dropped or if I ignore all those points because not a single one was presented as an argument.
Likewise, I have often found myself in the back of the room listening to cards on Foucault or Heidegger and wondering when the Neg would finally get down to explain the Kritik correctly to the Aff. Inevitably, they never could explain their Kritik (let alone explain it in English) and, thus, the Aff never was able to come up with an answer that would work. At the end of the round should I vote for the Kritik because, based on what the cards said, the Aff should lose, or do I dismiss it because the Neg team explained Biopower as an alternative energy source?
Heck, even basic debates can be hard to judge. Who wins – the Aff with .01% Solvency or the Neg with a Non-unique DA? In a debate this bad it isn’t like the students are going to weigh the round.
Good debaters don’t just win because they make more arguments than their opponents. They win because they make the RIGHT arguments against their opponents. Sometimes it is hard to recognize what the “right” argument looks like so great debaters point out their arguments and explain to us why they are “right”. REALLY GREAT debaters can do this with their bad arguments. The bottom line is that all debaters should be explaining to the judge both how and why to vote on each issue. Without explanation and comparison, the debaters are simply forcing arbitrary decisions and, what amounts to judge intervention.
I think that all too often, experienced judges vote for teams because their Flows showed some white space or because they understood what the Link to the DA was supposed to say. In many cases we may not even recognize that this is the way we are voting since some of the issues and positions have been heard so many times that we don’t pay attention to the details or we just assume that the evidence we couldn’t understand was the correct card.
Neophyte judges don’t do this. They approach each round with what is truly a blank slate. They don’t understand the arguments and thus, if a team wants to win, the debaters must clearly explain each and every important issue in the round. Maybe it is a time that all judges checked their knowledge of debate at the door and put that responsibility back in the hands of the debaters.
5 Responses to “Thursday Thing to Read: Against Good Judges”
I think there are two issues at play here. First, good judges don't vote because they understand "what the Link to the DA was supposed to say." They vote on what the debaters said. But this doesn't mean checking debate knowledge at the door, it means not intervening. I think I agree with the fundamental premise that good debaters make the right arguments, but I don't see why this excludes experienced judges from the calculus. Why shouldn't debaters make the right arguments against their opponents and ones that their judge will understand? Like, there's a reason my debater didn't run "condoms= health care" at yale, but might at Marx… If blips aren't arguments, then judges should make that clear in their paradigms (I think mine says something like "I won't vote on an extension without a warrant and impact"). Besides, didn't the NFL create PF to take care of the judge specialization issue?
By Liz Vieira on Sep 28, 2006
ok, there weren't 2 issues but I have 500 cases to edit before valley… see some of you there!!
By Liz Vieira on Sep 28, 2006
A caveat: my post is only in response to the contention that we should be encouraging more lay judges in policy debate. If a debater does in fact have an inexperienced judge they should do everything in that situation to adapt to win that ballot and not antagonize a judge by going to fast, etc. Nonetheless, with all due respect, I couldn't disagree more with Jason’s post. There are three main points I have:
First, having lay judges detracts from other skills that modern debate should encourage. I posted about 9 months ago in defense of VSS debate; I think a lot of the arguments I made there are very applicable to the discussion here. Liz hinted at the main argument: that modern policy debate (and I'm guessing to a lesser extent LD– although I'm woefully unqualified to discuss LD) is a unique form where certain skills are emphasized. Talking pretty and explaining arguments so your grandmother (or the proverbial bus driver) can understand them is a great skill to have in life– that's why there are lots of other activities that high school students can join where they can hone these skills, besides policy debate: forensics, student congress, mock trial, Model UN, etc. Policy debate is different, and that’s why I think it is a great activity: it not only emphasizes speaking skills, but also encourages rapid thinking and is much more intensive research-wise. These are skills that the aforementioned activities either barely encourage or do not encourage at all. Having lay judge detracts from the point of the activity. It forces a change in the priorities of policy debate; instead of the debaters trying to make many arguments well, they are forced to slow down the debate and, frankly, dumb down their arguments. Where as a debater competing in front of a Bill Batterman or a Matt Olson or a Jason Chapman can make sophisticated arguments based from a variety of literature bases, such as economics or post-modern philosophy; those arguments, for all intensive purposes, are out of the question with a random person from off the street. While adaptation is still a very important part of modern policy debate (debaters may not run critical arguments in front of me because I don’t like listening to them as much as other arguments), encouraging lay judging puts adaptation at a premium over all other skill sets in debate. While this might be a noble goal, this is already accomplished by other activities.
Second, having lay judges does not help debaters adapt for the “real world.” Having a sophisticated and stylized language for policy debate, such as Jason’s references to theoretical arguments, is a GOOD thing. It trains high school students for real world situations. Every profession has a stylized language that one must learn and be able to communicate. For example, law students learn the law so that they can use their knowledge in the courtroom someday. Eventually, when that lawyer is practicing law, much of his work is directed towards communicating his specialized knowledge towards other people, particularly judges and juries (who have been properly instructed by the judges of the law). In every speech to a court or in every document that lawyer writes, that person will be using language that is equally, if not more, arcane than the language of a modern policy debate. Countless other professions have similar language barriers to someone outside that profession. Similarly, in modern debate, a debater learns a specialized language that is arcane to someone outside the activity, and works on communicating through that language and adapting it to make it persuasive to a particularly specialized audience. While learning to be persuasive to the local bus driver might be important, that skill can be advanced in other activities: modern policy debate creates a simulated atmosphere close to real life professional experiences where a student learns a specialized vocabulary and then uses it to communicate their ideas with that vocabulary.
Lastly, using lay judges encourages judge intervention. Lay judges, unlike experienced policy judges, are simply more likely to make decisions on things irrelevant from what was actually said in the debate. If you put my mother into the back of a debate round, she would undoubtedly vote for whoever was nicer, where as if you put my father in the back of the room, he would probably vote for whoever espoused something closely resembling the platform of the Republican Party, regardless of what was actually said in the round. The more invested in the activity the judge is and the more experienced the judge is, the less likely they will intervene in such an arbitrary way, because that judge values the idea of nonintervention. Regardless of how many times we can read the WDCA rules to the lay judge before the round, it is pretty rare that a lay judge will refrain from intervening in a debate round. I could put a few examples in here, but I don want to belabor a fairly obvious point. Accordingly, judge intervention is a bad thing. I made this argument quite a bit in my banter with Nathan Hanson back in December, but the basic argument is that if a judge intervenes they take the decision out of the hands of the debaters and make the round and the words said in it meaningless.
Bottom line: policy debate is special because of the skill set it promotes. Don’t ruin that by encouraging lay judges. That being said…. We have a HUGE problem in the activity with having qualified judges. I’d rather have a “bad” judge, than no judge at all. Best, Andy
By Andy Nolan on Sep 28, 2006
Wow Jason, reading this made me realize that I'm not the only one with many of the complaints you detail in the "I know" "likewise" and "heck" paragraphs. I think I've gotten more lax about accepting them in policy rounds but really bristle when similar things pop up in LD. I didn't share Andy's perception, though, that this is an article advocating lay judges. I took it as a serious comment to those of us who really understand the intracacies should demand a bit more and require debaters to explain things. I don't think we'd lose the high speed thought game if we did. Many debates become a war of concepts that judges are expected to understand if they have expereince instead of a war of arguments. Theory arguments or kritik arguments, the two that Jason highlights well, are the best examples. Theory debates in particular are often have the substance of a 1AC composed of all tags and no cards (which would REALLY make the round a high speed game). I'm a sucker to vote on T or theory if teams actually tell the story that goes with the concepts they assert. I think it not only stems from a personal belief that apt procedural debates have real world value but also hearing a warranted story on why to vote is unfortunately rare. I think the question of whether those of us with experience are judging fairly (or well) when we use our knowledge to fill in the unstated gap… somthing the neophyte judge is incapable of doing. The same issue comes up in legal practice. If I'm writing a summary judgement motion for a sexual harassment case and EEOC judge I can use terms and invoke doctrines without explaning them. If I have the same case in front of a federal judge who was a criminal prosecutor I explain every detail and doctrine. I come down on the side of not wanting to fill in the gaps. A less expereinced team who may not really understand the other side's severance perm has little chance to argue against it but might if its at least a bit more explained. I also don't like the feeling that I needed to connect the dots to give a win instead of voting for one sides clear story.
By Tim Scheffler on Sep 29, 2006
I love how this has generated some great discussion of what makes a good judge. Of course, that was the ultimate aim - the more we think about what good judging is the closer we will all get to being the ideal judge. And, just for the record, I am not going to be chucking my hard earned debate knowledge out the door any time soon
By Jason Chapman on Oct 5, 2006