Recorded Training: How to Judge British Parliamentary Debating

0:00 okay so hello I'm going to talk about adjudication I will make some caveats firstly I will do my best to kind of tailor this to a range of kind of levels whether you've done no adjudicating or quite readable adjudicating hopefully there'll be something useful for everyone here the other thing is and I said this at the last training I did around development kind of and progress as a debater even if you don't really think judging is for you I

0:31 strongly encourage you to do it because I think at the very least it will be very helpful for your debating progress because it allows you to look at what other Debaters are maybe not doing quite as well and reflect on that and incorporate that into your own speaking but on that note I hope that even if you have no intention to judge after this aspects of this seminar or whatever but will still be useful to apply to your invading but judging

0:58 can be rewarding in and of itself so if you not I've done it already I really encourage you to have a go so I'm going to just start off with some more basic things and then I'm probably going to ramble a little bit on my own thoughts and philosophy before kind of stepping you through a few different resources that are out there how to kind of improve your own judging from hero now so I'm just gonna kind of skim past

1:20 these first few slides I'm going to assume that everyone here has a very very basic level of familiarity with the British parliamentary feedback in terms of and as well some of the key differences between this and the three on three format that's been the order of that team speaking and so on and so on Plies all that fun stuff okay but if you have any general questions about those Basics let me know so I'm sure a lot of you know this

1:46 already this is just a very very high level conceptually conceptualization about what it is overall judges do you are taking notes keeping order of the debate namely if you are chairing the debate enforcing rules making sure people don't speak over time dealing with technical issues if you're judging online which is obviously was a lot more common in sort of covert era but still is the case now and generally just keeping flow of who you think is winning

2:15 the debate I'm generally over metrics of how robust analysis is how important arguments are and how well those arguments are engaged with this is all very similar at a conceptual level to how you would judge a normal three-on-three debate so all of these General aspects apply regardless of whether it's a three on three BP or kind of any other format really so that's again very basic conceptual the thing that's really important in BP although it obviously is still important

2:47 in like austral style but I think is you know all the more emphasizing BP is that holistic judging is basically taking everything in the debate that happened and being comparative so what do I mean by that what are some examples closing government is derivative their extension is so similar to opening government does that mean they fourth maybe not necessarily because maybe another team in the debate did something

3:18 worse right so again there's no kind of you know one-size-fits-all solution in BP judging everything is a comparative exercise so again the whip brought in new material does this mean they lose maybe maybe not it just depends on the debate so that's kind of what the idea of holistic judging refers to it's about not applying very static rules and understandings you might have of debating and just enforcing that very rigidly in the debate it should inform

3:49 how you judge the debate but it shouldn't you know definitively guide the way that you make decisions I hope that kind of makes sense so far and obviously it's about applying standards equally so as much as you penalize one team for maybe not analyzing an argument particularly well you should apply that same standard against any other team in the debate so again I know it seems so obvious but it is a thing that a lot of donors Miss

4:16 this is probably a term that you've heard already but this is useful for both judges to be aware of and especially Debaters basically the standard that any judge should be judging from is that of the average intelligent voter what is that person you do not have any preformed views about the the topic you do not come from anywhere in the world in particular so we don't assume you to be Australian or from a Western Country or

4:42 whatever whilst you aren't you know equipped to understand very technical vocabulary whether that be about Finance or law or like literally any area we do you do still have a general understanding of current affairs history and what is going on in the world now there's always going to be a bit of a fine line as to what constitutes something an average intelligent voter knows or not and I've literally had world's final decisions come down to and

5:11 split votes based on like literal like differences in that interpretation so it's not something that is always clear but in general there are probably 90 of the examples that can be very clearly delineated and then the other 10 is a little bit more tricky so you know I think an average intelligent voter would absolutely know that there is a conflict occurring in the Ukraine an average intelligent voter would absolutely know that Joe Biden is President and those

5:38 sorts of things and then there's very Niche knowledge and then you know this again stuff that's in the middle I think one of the I I'll just be kind of blunt and saying this one of the very common pitfalls that Debaters make is assuming that just because something is not in the western media that it's like incapable of like it's that an average intelligent voter would be uncapable incapable of kind of knowing that fact I've literally heard a

6:04 debater be like this debate should have no relevance to examples in Africa because no average intelligent voter reads news about Africa I think it's obviously true in some instances that those things don't have the same prevalence but a blanket statement like that I would not encourage you to go down the route off so long story short this is the perspective you you judge something by as well and for that reason if someone is giving you a factual claim in the debate that

6:33 you feel very strongly the average intelligent voter should know it's probably not on that debater to then have to prove with like three structural reasons why this argument is true you should be able to probably credit that argument on the face of it whereas if a very technical example you're not sure it pays for the debater to do a little bit more analytical work to prove that that fact has basis does that make sense so that's how you come at it from a

6:58 judge perspective but equally that's what you should keep in mind as a debater okay but yeah like long story short they and the average intelligent voter is not a technical expert but nor are they a complete dummy they do know some things they are capable of following persuasion and those sorts of things okay I'll probably just skip this bit because it's kind of a little bit outdated now in the sense that this was like a very major change to the world's

7:23 judging manual a little bit ago but it's kind of fairly well known now I I want to say we'll get to in a second what the world's judging manual is and why maybe you should give it a skim but long story short the key takeaway here is that pois have a particular importance in terms of their functionality in the debate so again something you should consider as a debater but also something that you ought factor in as a judge

7:51 so basically long story short Debaters should accept at least one POI and judges if a POI is not taken can lower speaker scores adjust the margin of Victory or flip close calls so those are the things that you're empowered to do as a judge if someone fails to take a POI how do you determine what is appropriate you have to kind of use a bit of common sense if team is still winning very clearly you're not going to

8:18 flip the call simply because they didn't take up POI but you might dock them a speaker point because that engagement was necessary and they should have engaged yada yada making sense so far and sorry I should say please interrupt at any point if you have questions okay I'm probably going to skip over this unless anyone has any particular questions but long story short I could I could go on a whole spiel about different motion types and how they have

8:46 certain types of burdens and implications this is a really complicated area especially if you're someone that maybe isn't as familiar with this long story short there are a lot of resources I will know at the end that can give you more guidance about what the particular burdens from different motion types might infer but we're kind of you know just as like a headliner we're talking about you know as an aftermotion you have to prove that the

9:13 thing is right from the actor's perspective as a policy version you have to implement a model whereas as a values motion you maybe don't have to those are the sorts of things I'm talking about but that literally is like you know in our presentation in and of itself so I won't go into it as much here but other than just to note that this is a useful thing for you to be aware of both as a

9:34 debater and a judge okay but judges should penalize teams for kind of squirreling debates or setting up things unnecessarily narrowly and again there's always a fine line between what is a legitimate and maybe slightly strategic setup of a debate versus something that is illegitimate but again you kind of have to use your common sense a bit so a really really easy go-to one is like if the motion is this house would legalize all drugs and the opening government

10:04 defines this as we're just legalizing marijuana that's clearly a squirrel that's clearly an unnecessarily an unnecessary narrowing of the debate right and again there are going to be great examples and less obvious ones but that is a starting point I would say okay this is really really important this is probably one of the most important things I would emphasize if you're going to get into judging but obviously something you should also keep in mind as a debater

10:31 obviously like let's just be blunt we come from I'm not going to assume everyone's like backgrounds but we come from a space where lots of people are going to be inclined to have like a liberal left dis possibly views and that's fine and that's legitimate but when we go back to our average intelligent voter metric we cannot assume that that person has any hard political leanings nor can we assume that they would necessarily prioritize certain types of

10:57 philosophical argumentation over another so utilitarian metrics over deontological metrics and those sorts of things so for that reason you have to keep in mind that neural one type of argument in debates is automatically more persuasive as a judge you should be deferring to how well did teams actually prove the the mechanisms that underpin their argument but equally the impacts right so if a team that just says we will have more right-wing populism just ends their argument at

11:26 that maybe you can give them some credit for hinting at an impact but unless they go on and actually explain why right-wing populism is bad you ought not just give it default credit because that's something that again the average intelligent voter wouldn't necessarily be like oh I know why that's bad easy done so that's obviously the case with political arguments but it goes you know for all of these types of comparisons so again if a team makes a really

11:51 compelling principled argument and the team on the other side makes a really compelling practical argument you have to do some work as a judge to evaluate what is more important don't just assume that something with impacts is necessarily more important it might be it might be if the team does the work to prove that it is but you have to kind of unpack that a little bit more and that's the same for like kind of what I

12:13 mentioned before about fact claims maybe a team gives a beautifully analyzed factual analysis and another team says I have three structural reasons maybe the structural reasons to do in but you cannot automatically assume that's the case so if that's if all of this has confused you the long story short is don't just assume certain types of arguments are more persuasive you should defer to what teams have said in terms of how they impact and weigh those

12:42 arguments and equally as a debater you should keep this in mind and not be lazy with the way that you make arguments take them to their completion impact them even if you don't think they maybe need impacting making sense so far cool okay again really skimming over this because this should be very obvious to people style is not Irrelevant in debating you can be persuaded by style to the extent that an argument is more comprehensible

13:14 precisely conveys a speaker's meaning and maybe really sort of Riles up the emotional or moral significance of an argument that is all fine and that is permissible under the world's judge manual but you should not you know obviously give Credence to any subjective you know assessments of what good style is you know the obvious stuff about just because you speak in a preppy you know Oxford sounding accent does not mean you're more persuasive it's your job as a judge to get past

13:42 you know maybe someone has an accent that you're just less familiar to hearing that's fine but you have to do the work in making sure you're sort of overcoming any difficulties you might happen to have there so for example if there's a if there is a particular accent that you find a little bit more difficult to follow it is if the onus is on you to watch more speakers from people who use that accent or anything

14:08 like that right because again the job the onus is on you and it and and people shouldn't be like incredibly obvious reasons I'm not penalized because they happen to speak a little bit differently to you okay that should be like super obvious I'm not going to spend more time on that okay this is where BP gets a little bit tricky and this is probably the most pronounced distinction I would say between the three on three and the BP

14:34 format the the essence of what this slide is getting at is to say no other team should influence how you evaluate two other teams if that makes sense so very basically like let's give a very obvious example if CG has done a really good job at defending the government bench that does not benefit OG in any way right so if at the end of the top half you have opening opposition winning over opening

15:05 government that order remains regardless of what happens in the back half of the debate right like if CG gives a great defense of the government bench that does not help OG in any way so you have to evaluate all comparisons independently so that basically means you're essentially making six comparisons in the debate you're evaluating OG versus oo you're evaluating CG against OG and then against Power and then you're evaluating Co against OG Oro and CG I

15:40 know that sounds a bit complicated and it will become easy with time and it will become a bit implicit for a lot of you like you'll just kind of and sometimes the reasons why a team loses to how the team are going to be similar so let's say everyone had a really impactful contribution in the debate and then Co was extremely derivative the reasons why they lose to OG o o and CG will probably be broadly similar right

16:05 like the the general reasoning is you were derivative they had more contribution than you they had more contribution than you and they had more contribution than you but you still have to make that independent assessment if that makes sense so yeah long story short if you can take anything away from this slide it's to not let other team things influence how you evaluate the comparison between two specific teams if that makes sense again it's a it's a starting point

16:32 you've become a lot easier the more you judge I think again we can probably skim over all of this I think generally speaking people probably have some familiarity with the idea that closing teams can't knife their openings in BP new material has a broad scope so as a whip you can introduce new weighing impacts mechanisms examples you just can't introduce holy new holy new arguments obviously what the line for that is is going to be gray in some

17:00 instances but again use common sense this key thing that I'll kind of note with the top dot point is that it's become an increasing Trend in I want to say the last like three four years in debating that in an attempt to weigh over opening so you're a closing team right you want to prove you've beaten your opin government for example you say oh we have a the reason we you know we've rebutted our opposition and we

17:26 also think we beat our opening because our impact is bigger right that's kind of where it started but nowadays a lot of closing teams have resorted to actively rebutting their opening in an attempt to weigh over them this is a bad bad Trend that the Americans do worst of all and you should not follow their example it's obviously like a bit of a again fine line about what constitutes weighing over your teams versus what is rebutting them but like if what you're

17:56 saying is actively contradicting them you're probably you're probably knifing them it's probably bad you probably shouldn't do it you know unfortunately some judges do let speakers get away with this a little bit more than they should but I want you to fight the good fight and not let this happen Okay cool Equity again super quickly I'll just note that Equity is something that should be really dealt with outside of the debate if someone does something actively

18:23 unconscionable that should be the realm of an equity officer to deal with at a tournament or maybe you have you know an internal contact that being said obviously something that is objectively offensive is equally unlikely to be persuasive but you should evaluate it in that context and not be like well I'm the chair and you you know said something offensive so you've got an automatic fourth you just judge it how you normally would and then if you

18:47 need to talk to an equity officer you do so but you don't you know insert your like Grand Authority as a as a judge you still just judge it as you normally would notice that it might be less persuasive because it might be offensive and then other processes do with that Okay so I'm going to kind of focus this now a bit more on the perspective of both chairs and panelists so okay the debates happened you've taken notes you have a rough idea

19:17 of who you think has won maybe some order like some placements were really short on others are a bit less sure on so maybe the fourth and the first you've set on but the second and the third's a bit close to you right that's fine so typically the chair will go around the room and they will ask everyone for what their that Cole is and then guided deliberation so okay starting I guess from the chairs perspective so if you're chairing

19:48 a deliberation achieving consensus in a BP debate is sometimes a difficult feat right like especially if you have calls from all different directions right like maybe you've got two panelists and one's given the opposite call to each other and you've got a call somewhere in the middle you have to try to make sense of that and your goal is to reach some sort of human unanimity if you can and if you can't then you basically call a vote and

20:17 you might have split decisions across various components and that's fine that happens sometimes but where possible you try to reach 10 senses I think that I've like personally evolved a bit with how I tend to approach this over the years like personally speaking I really like working through the debate chronologically that makes sense to me because like I can't evaluate the closing teams until I know what has been just like said first in the opening part

20:43 of the debate so typically I will do the the pairwise comparison like I mentioned earlier I'll start with OG and oo and then I'll work through as it goes that said that is sometimes not the most efficient way of constructing a deliberation especially when maybe latter parts of the decisions are more contentious but maybe everyone agrees that like or has been OG right in those situations you can do one of two things I guess you can skip ahead to the more

21:11 contentious parts or you can just try to make that first part of the deliberation as efficient as it can be so I will sometimes still do that just to get a baseline of what was said in the debate so I'll say panelist one can you give me a one minute summary no more than that on why you think oo has been OG and assuming everyone is in an agreement with that we'll just quickly move on so there are a few different ways you

21:36 can do it there's no right or wrong way and obviously like you know for a lot of you that maybe haven't judged before you're not going to start off in this position so you don't need to stress but it's just something for you to be aware of especially because like often you'll get chairs that will that may have to cut you off or may ask for a very short summary and you're thinking why are you cutting me off let me talk right but

21:57 appreciate is because they have a job to do often at a tournament especially you'll be constrained with the deliberation time of 15 to 20 minutes that's not a lot of time especially once you you know do all the waffle stuff and you know fill out the ballots and all of that so just try to respect that I guess as much as possible and know that that's why they're often doing that that doesn't obviously excuse rudeness chairs

22:20 should still engage all members of the panel in a polite discussion involve everyone and if you're not involving all members of your panel including trainees who don't have a vote you have failed as a chair but again appreciate still that they have a job to do so yeah you go through it you try to reach consensus and if you can't there's a there's a skill to just knowing when to kind of call it a date and being like we're not

22:45 going to reach consensus that's okay let's call a vote and that's kind of how it is and you want to leave enough time to complete your ballot we'll go through speaker scores in just a sec but that from a like deliberation perspective does that make a bit of sense I'm gonna actually skip over to this bit and then go back so if you're paneling or a trainee these are I guess the top tips that I would give one

23:12 is just be very precise right if your chair has asked you to explain the difference between OG and oo do not go talking about closing half that's not the comparison that they've asked you to make and they will be annoyed at you for making that comparison so stick to what you've been asked at that time your chair has hopefully structured the deliberation they want for a reason so it kind of just trusts that process be as succinct as possible and I know

23:38 sometimes you'll feel like oh but I have so much more to say I think the best tip I can give you is give you a baseline justification and then say but I'm happy to expand on any of that if you'd like me to and then you've put the onus on the chair too they can invite you to expand if that you want to but keep it to her if they've said give me a quick justification give them a quick

23:58 justification you know but be be open and flexible like recognize that no one no judge is perfect and sound a good time I'll all speed up but yeah no judge is perfect we all miss things so it's important to be you know open that you might have missed something a weighing mechanism a point of rebuttal but that being said if you're not convinced do not flip just because you feel some degree of pressure like a lot

24:25 of people might feel convinced to flip their core because they're judging with someone who's reppy or whatever if you're just not convinced you you shouldn't change your vote and I will respect someone like even if I think maybe their call is maybe not 100 correct I will respect someone more for sticking to their guns than just flipping because I think they like want to please the judge or something and I and I know when someone's done

24:50 that right because if if they're just like yeah I'm happy to flip and they leave it at that I know that they they're not fully convinced whereas if they say to me and again tip number two if you have been convinced this is what I would say on second thoughts I'm happy to come around with reflection I realize I probably under credited that aspect of the rebuttal or didn't Factor blah blah so explain why you've changed your mind

25:13 because that would convince the judge that you've actually reconsidered things you're not just like changing your mind because you thought I bet I'll ask the judge is going to be peeped at me okay cool so that's that so we won't have time to go through this in a lot of detail but long story short if you are voting and you need to fill out a ballot this is what we call the speaker scale you can look at it a

25:42 lot more in your own time but it's really important to be familiar with this if you especially are planning to judge competitively like this will be you'll get links to this at any time that you judge so you don't have to worry about oh I don't know where to find this but long story short speakers look very very quickly on our ways what's the what's the key takeaways that I want to sort of emphasize here I think

26:09 look a good away is both comprehensive and succinct which is one of the hardest things you can do and you know I'm super guilty of this like my always go way too long I really try hard to keep them under 20 minutes but even then I struggle so really a BP always probably going to be a little bit longer than a three on three away just because you've got more teams to get through but really any longer than 15 minutes

26:34 is probably not the best bet and just as a comment on like how things have changed back when I started debating which is a very long time ago I want to say the meta was a lot different when I say The Meta I'm referring to like the Norms in the circuit at the time when I started it was very much you explained why first got first then you explain why second got second and third got third and

26:57 fourth got fourth nowadays it is a little bit different the very common methodology and this is not I want to say that you know you have to do this but I'm just telling you what is common is Judge will often do that complete chronological assessment of the debate firstly how was the front half resolved then they'll discuss CG and how CG fed against the two teams in front and then they'll bring in Co and then compare Co to every other team

27:23 which again does require you to essentially make six different comparisons in a 15-minute window which is not always easy to do so I want to say try and test the different away Styles at the point where you are giving aways and kind of see what sits and works for you not everyone will do it that way again I'm just telling you more just to be aware of and remember that sometimes you can even though again every comparison

27:50 should be based on that you know pairwise comparison you can still use aspects of the reasoning in multiple comparisons so again I'll just use that same example of if a CO was completely derivative no extension you're probably going to use a similar rationale for their comparison against all the other three teams just try not to repeat that too much like so CEO you lost to oh because you're a derivative CEO you lost to OG because you're a derivative Co you

28:19 lost to CG because you're derivative see if you can kind of package it in a way that's a little bit more efficient than that while still acknowledging that comparison has to be made to all three teams if this is totally overwhelming at this stage don't worry about it chances are you'll have time to practice always in less stressful settings and you'll have time you know if you're just starting out to watch judges give always and be very precise about it

28:44 and honestly like it's taken years for me to get to a point where I'm comfortable with the ways you're giving I'm giving so don't stress at all this is just basically how judges are scored I'm not going to go into this in a lot of detail because you probably don't need to worry about it anytime soon the long story short judges are also scored on how they deliberate and give OAS I've gone down that okay so I think

29:12 that's pretty much it as far as the general summation is concerned I just want to quickly know a few really key resources that I think will be sort of helpful for you on your judging Journey so the first is this was the complete judge and debater briefing from the last World Championships and it goes he goes into what I kind of just covered in a lot lot more detail but what is very interesting and fun is oh

29:43 my God it's so long why don't we make it so long we do a judge test right every most major tournaments will have a judge test that you have to do to check your theory of judging you understand broadly correctly so this can be a useful thing to do yourself to kind of just test where you are at maybe a little bit more difficult to do here because the answers are actually in here but yeah so you can find this on the

30:08 Madrid worlds Facebook page or I can like send out a dossier after this to be sent out or something so yeah very useful resource another thing is oh my God sorry there's so many I'm gonna record your thing another thing that was on the Madrid worlds page so this was the the worlds that just happened to to be clear so what what is often like missing from I think the resource the pack of debate resourcing is we often have

30:37 videos of debates online but very rarely do we see the process behind the scenes so one of the things I was very proud of that we were able to do for Madrid is we filmed an entire debate from start to finish that was all of all four teams preps then we filmed the debate then we filmed the deliberation and then we filmed the oral adjudication so if you want to watch a really high level version of all of that

31:01 I recommend going to the page that's a great resource and what else sorry again I will I will try to people privacy somehow and then we also compiled all the feedback that judges got over the tournament so like a million different data points and then surmise they're into the key trends for judges and like the key things judges were doing well and that judges were doing wrong and things that you

31:32 know resulted in a judge getting very good scores versus maybe more average scores so this is another thing that I'd suggest you could read and what else there's just like so many resources online honestly you can be a little bit overwhelming sometimes with the amount of content that is up there but there is a lot so you know I encourage you to explore start with like you know the pages of pages and kind of work from there like even

31:58 career worlds going back like two worlds ago had a really great what's what I'm looking for dossier of videos on how to track and take notes as a judge which is really useful as a resource if that's something that you struggle with so there's just so much out there but I think I'll leave it there sorry I'm a bit over but I can answer any quick questions if anyone has them but yeah just hopefully you know you retain

32:26 some of that and really just start out and don't worry too much like judging's hard and just give it a go and I'm sure you'll improve myself that's it any questions but I'm happy to stop as well you'll want to just fit into things would that be maybe I can send out like a doll like just a quick compilation of resources you guys can forget somewhere just because it's like you're probably not going to remember how to find all of

32:56 these things that I'm telling you about so cool but also just message me on Facebook and I'm like really happy to just like cold cold you know answer any random questions you have so all right we'll see