Judging Requirements

Teams should bring one qualified judge for every 3 LDers or PF teams  and every 5 Speech entries, rounded up in the case of fractional obligations.  Teams with Congress entries must bring 1 Congress judge to cover their whole entry.  You may not cover VLD entries with Novice-only judges. Congress judges might be swapped into another judging pool; please indicate which other pool a Congress judge would like to judge if we cannot use him/her in Congress when registering.  Likewise, qualified Speech judges may be asked to judge a round of Congress. Judges in all divisions are obligated to stay and judge one round past any round in which their students are actively competing.  We will assume judges are staying past their obligation unless we hear otherwise: let us know if you are leaving.

A “qualified judge” understands the activity, speaks English, and is either experienced sitting in the back of the room with a ballot or flow pad as the case may be, or else has been carefully trained by the team he or she is accompanying. A qualified judge knows how to assign ranks or wins/losses, speaker points, and knows how to fill out comments on a ballot.  Please do not try to sneak in an untrained ringer. When you provide an incompetent judge, we usually find out about it only after a number of competitors have been, in a word, shafted, while you have been basking in the glow of judging by trained or experienced judges.  This does not do justice to us or to the forensics community.

We’re also committed to hiring a quality pool of judging in all divisions.  However, given the relatively small number of judges in the immediate New Jersey area, bringing this pool to Princeton is both complex and expensive. To aid us in that effort, the registration system will ask you to explicitly request judge hires.  Please request early; we will not harm the quality of our tournament by oversubscribing hired judging as certain other tournaments do.  Judges dropped after registration is frozen on November 27th, even if you drop students to compensate, will incur a fee you will not want to pay.  Similarly, if you add a judge after November 27th, you will still be required to pay for the hireds you signed up for, unless someone else should need a last-minute hire, since we’ll be paying that judge either way.

As usual, we ask that each varsity judge be rated by you when you pre-register online. This year we will also offer community ratings and strikes in Varsity LD. Any Varsity LD school with proper judge coverage (yours or hired), will be able to strike 5 judges. A complete judge list will be posted as soon as possible after the closing of registration. We will note on the list the rankings (A,B,C,D) given by the submitting schools. If you say your judge is an A, that’s what the list will say. Strikes must be in our hands by 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 2nd in order to be included in Round 1. Please register your strikes on tabroom.com in registration once the judge list is posted; if you’re not getting a strike option when you go into your online registration, it probably means your judging is not covered; you need to do that first.

Any LDer who has made strikes but whose own judges fail to materialize at the tournament will forfeit their strikes. Other students will be allowed to enter strikes at the registration table on December 2nd, but we can only guarantee that their strikes will go into effect by round 3. Strikes may not last through elimination rounds, but we’ll see what we can do. Usually this is not a problem.

LD Community rankings

In an effort to equalize the judging pool without giving any particular advantage to anyone, we use a system of ranking the judges by popular consent. Our belief is that “1″ judges should be adjudicating so-called bubble rounds (down 1 or 2): debaters who are on the edge of contention for elimination rounds. “3″ judges are best placed for adjudicating where the stakes are less high. And “2s” fit where they fit. Rather than the tab room deciding arbitrarily who’s what on our own, we will leave it to you. We will post a list of judges (with their A, B, C or D ratings) on tabroom.com on November 30th. Each school may rate each judge 1, 2 or 3. We will simply rank a judge where he or she gets the majority of votes; that is, no complicated math, just rate them as the voting public sees them. We set no limits; you can rank as many as you want whatever you want. Rankings are due with strikes, by Thursday, December 3rd at 9:00 PM, and may similarly be entered on tabroom.com. As for elimination rounds, we will pair as equitably as possible; every round should get the same proportion of A/B/C.  Judges added to the list after 9/30 will be ranked by the tab room.

Paradigms

Judges may or may not publish paradigms as they see fit, although we urge them to do so, but in either case, they should be willing to indicate to competitors before a round a general sense of their vision of LD (if any) or a sense of their experience, to aid competitors in choosing how best to make their arguments.  Judges publishing paradigms, however, will likely be rated somewhat higher, and see better rounds, than those who do not.  Be warned.  If you have a published paradigm, please send us the text or a link in your tabroom.com registration or by email to princeton@tabroom.com so we can collate them for the competitors.