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Difference between revisions of "Introduction to Circuit Debate"
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Added Ordinals and Pairing explanation
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At the conclusion of the tournament, awards are typically given out for the top speakers of the tournaments (determined by your speaker points) and for the elimination round that you have reached. | At the conclusion of the tournament, awards are typically given out for the top speakers of the tournaments (determined by your speaker points) and for the elimination round that you have reached. | ||
==== What are prefs? ==== | ==== What are prefs? ==== | ||
Most national circuit tournaments offer "prefs", or the ability to rank your judges based on your preference for them to judge you. Usually, you rank all judges in the pool on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 being your most preferred judge, and 6 being your least preferred judge. When being assigned an opponent, you will be assigned a judge who both you and your opponent mutually prefer, that is, the judge who you and your opponent have the closest pref match, with higher prefs being preferred. | Most national circuit tournaments offer "prefs", or the ability to rank your judges based on your preference for them to judge you. Usually, you rank all judges in the pool on a scale of 1 to 6, with 1 being your most preferred judge, and 6 being your least preferred judge. The manner in which you pref judges is completely subjective, though debaters will typically pref the judges who they think have the best ability to evaluate the style of argumentation that the debater likes to read. | ||
When being assigned an opponent, you will be assigned a judge who both you and your opponent mutually prefer, that is, the judge who you and your opponent have the closest pref match, with higher prefs being preferred. | |||
===== Ordinal Prefs ===== | |||
Sometimes, tournaments will offer an alternative form of mutual judge preference besides the tiered system where you rank judges from 1 to 6. Instead, you will rank each judge from 1-N where N is the number of judges in the pool. For example, if there are 85 judges in the pool, you can rank judges from 1 to 85 with 1 being your most preferred judge and 85 being your least preferred judge. | |||
These types of prefs are more accurate because in a tiered system where you rate judges from 1 to 6, not all of the judges in the 1 tier may be equally preferred. However, with an ordinal system, you can distinguish between for favorite judge (Your "ordinal" 1) and a judge that you think is great, but maybe not your favorite (Maybe your "ordinal" 10). | |||
However, these prefs may require one to do more work because rather than placing a judge in a tier from 1 to 6, you must place a judge relative to all judges in a pool. This seems overwhelming! How is one able to distinguish between the 23rd best judge and the 24th best judge? An easy solution is to rank judges into tiers first (assigning a value of 1 to 6), saving your prefs, and then sorting within those tiers. | |||
===== How prefs are used in tournaments ===== | |||
Tournaments may vary in how they assign judges and how they pair rounds, but traditionally the Tabroom software will prioritize assigning the best judges to debaters who are "on the bubble" or in other words, debaters who have two losses. Then, it will assign judges to debaters with one loss, then those with zero losses, then those with three losses, and then those with four losses. | |||
Moreover, traditional Tabroom software will prioritize "mutuality" rather than "preference" What does this mean? It means with the traditional tiered system, Tabroom will try to look for a judge that both debaters have ranked 1, then look for a judge that both debaters have ranked 2, then look for a judge both debaters have ranked 3, and then look for a judge one debater has ranked a 1 and the other debater has ranked a 2. More simply, Tabroom will look for a 1-1 judge, then 2-2 judge, then 3-3 judge, before it looks for a 1-2 judge. | |||
== Foundational Ideas == | == Foundational Ideas == | ||
In this section, we will lay out some of the foundational ideas of National Circuit Lincoln-Douglas debate. We will assume a basic level of familiarity with traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate. | In this section, we will lay out some of the foundational ideas of National Circuit Lincoln-Douglas debate. We will assume a basic level of familiarity with traditional Lincoln-Douglas debate. | ||