As I was reading today, I came across a paragraph that, just about, fits the quality of judges in some debate tournaments. I'm not singling out public forum debate as I've heard some whopper RFD's for just about all speech and debate events.
Basically, an FBI agent had worked hard for his career and lands his dream job at the FBI. "...all of it had been training for the Bureau, and now that he was here, he hated like hell to think it could all go away at the hands of a boss who clearly disliked him...Funny how that works. You get assigned to work for a man who doesn't know his ass from a whole in the ground, and then it's the incompetent one who gets to write the performance evaluation." Gilstrap, John. Even Steven.
The kids will tell you, "You work your butt off, and then it's the incompetent judge that gets to do the judging."
Unfortunately, it's very true. Every ballot we judges fill out, we have to give a RFD, reason for decision. When you have judges that have no idea what they are suppose to be judging you find the strangest RFD's. Some might make some sense, "the pro team had a better argument", some will leave you stumped, "I liked the pro better" and some will just tick you off, "if you are going to list you contentions then you should alphabetize the sub points". This is a debate! This is not LA class.
What hurts the kids the most is the cost of losing a debate on a non issue. There is no right or wrong way to list sub points. You don't really even need sub points. So, to lose with the RFD being a lack of correct sup point listing, it's a terrible thing.
I started this blog to write about my time on the public forum debate circuit (for lack of a better word) and the biggest complaint I hear and see is the judging quality. I decided to spend the next few days informing future judges what exactly public forum debate is and how to judge it.
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