I’ve been reflecting a lot about debate norms, behaviors, and exclusivity (as I wrote about a few days ago). I’ve also been grading essays as best as I can in-between all the other important things.

In teaching, we are as transparent about expectations as we can be – I use rubrics and I teach specific skills, then reteach them as needed. I show examples of strong and weak essays, and we go through them and discuss strengths and weaknesses, why one would get an A grade while another might get a C. My students know the rules of the game and while achieving at an A level is tough and requires real work and revision for many of them, it is attainable.

Teachers and graders of state and national exams also discuss their standards and rubrics, going through a period of standardization so that they can accurately determine what score an essay should get and so that there is enough standardization that an essay going to any given scorer is going to get relatively the same score.

This same basic process is required for judges of sports as well. Gymnastics, diving, figure skating judges – all of these folks use a specific rubric of sorts and have basic training to make sure their scores are relatively similar, given what they are seeing. This was true of my training as a soccer referee, too, where we were shown videos of games and shown what calls would be made. The athletes in these sports know what is expected of them – they know the rules, they know the way judging works, and they train with that in mind.

This doesn’t spill over into debate very much, which really doesn’t make much sense to me. I have been judging and coaching now for 15 years, and I’ve judged at the state and national level. Still, I’ve never actually sat down at watched a round with other experienced judges and talked about it. Aside from the NSDA official ballots, I’ve never been shown exactly what to look for in a debate. I have learned from doing, and apparently I do an okay job of it, considering I get asked back relatively regularly.

Still – there is not a real clear expectation for debaters and for judges, which makes it really difficult to help students prepare, especially for new programs and people. This is a major barrier for entry into debate: there are so many unwritten expectations and rules that it’s pretty difficult to learn from an outsiders perspective.

Here are some questions a new person might ask:

• How do you determine how many points to give?
• What is a low point win? Why are these given?
• How do you decide who wins? What specific things should I be looking for?
• What should I expect in a (LD/PF/Policy/Classic/whatever) round?
• What happens if the debater says something I know is obviously untrue, but the other debater doesn’t call him/her out on it – do I count that point?
• How should I handle it if I think someone is being rude or disrespectful?

These are just a few that I remember having early on. I still sometimes find myself questioning myself, even though I feel pretty confident in my ability to listen and understand a debate. I know I’m not the only one who wishes I understood how other well respected members of the debate community listened to debates and judged them. I know, we get ballots, but let’s face it: those aren’t especially clear and if you don’t see what happened in the arguments, it can be hard to understand the comments. Let’s also face it: some people don’t do a very good job even giving any comments.

Debate community: why don’t we have an agreed-upon way to judge debate, the way diving judges, figure-skating judges, essay scorers, and teachers do? Why do we leave it up to coaches to magically know who judges are and how they make decisions? Wouldn’t it be easier to get and retain judges if there was a basic expectations manual or rubric – some way to determine the winner of the round that is open and transparent and similar no matter what room and round a debater ends up in?

I know it would be easier to teach new debaters, new coaches, and new judges if there was some consistency of expectations and of excellence. I’m not talking about a debate wiki where you can look up judge paradigms – that’s overwhelming and confusing for new folks or teams with very few resources. I’m talking about having some basic agreements about what constitutes “good debate,” what it looks like, what it sounds like, and how it is calculated by the judge. Did these ever exist? Why don’t we have this now?

This season has been long. One week until State.