Judge Instructions

Preparing for the tournament

1. You must have been trained. If you have not been trained yet, there will be a final training session on Friday May 7 at 6pm.

2. Make sure your computer is compatible with NSDA campus by going here

3. This folder contains all judge training materials

Special instructions

1. On Saturday night, we will send out a list of judges who are expected to judge on Sunday. You may be asked to judge for one round past the point when your school is eliminated.

2. On Sunday, you will judge in panels of three. All judges vote independently. Make your decision alone, and submit your ballot before discussing the round with anyone.

3. On Sunday, students will have a choice of three topics, which you will announce to them when they are all present. The students will conduct a coin toss, and the winner may either choose the topic or choose their side. The topic is always chosen before the side. Once the topic and sides are set, students have 20 minutes to prepare, then the debate should begin each round.

4. Be mindful of the procedure for scoring two-person teams:

Give a single, overall score to the student who speaks twice.

Your ballot will list a third student named "Placeholder". Simply give them a speaker score that is the average of the scores you gave to the two real debaters. For decimals, round up to the nearest whole number. For example, if there is a two person team, Alice and Bob, and Alice gets a 76 and Bob gets a 74, then on your ballot give Placeholder a 75.

Procedure on the day of the tournament

We will make announcements via the live doc.

1. Find your ballot: On tabroom.com, click on your email address in the top right corner, then in the sidebar, under the “Judging” section, click “Current ballots and panels”. This will give you a blue button for your room and a green button for your ballot. These will only be visible when you are actively assigned to judge an upcoming debate. On Sunday, we will use zoom instead. You will simply be told to go to a certain breakout room.

2. Only when all debaters arrive, press the green “Start Round” button. Timing is important. The tournament staff can see whether you have pushed the button, so pushing it is your way of signalling to us that all debaters are present, and not pushing it is your way of signalling that there is a problem.

3. If you are still missing students five minutes after the posted start time and you have not already spoken with Evan or Nick, text 917 579 1834 or 203 810 7112.

4. At the end of the debate, make your decision and submit it before you talk to the students. This small step will help keep the tournament on time. You can add written feedback to your ballot after it is submitted, so please submit the decision and speaker scores first.

5. Throughout the day, please watch your email for messages from the administrators.

6. If you do not see any ballot assigned, come to the judge lounge. We will ask you to wait until we are certain that all rounds have started, and then send you on your way. We do this because we often have to make one or two last-minute judge swaps.

Thank you for judging!