Judging Information

If you are a judge and you have questions, please check out the FAQ page!

Qualified judges are an essential component of any tournament. A qualified judge is an individual who has either graduated from high school with forensics competition experience or who has already had at least one year of forensics judging experience. For Varsity LD and Varsity CX debate, our expectation is your judges have had at least 10 tournaments judging the event before. High school students may not judge. Please list judges by full name when entering the tournament. Judge names should remain consistent throughout the tournament. It is each school's responsibility to furnish an adequate number of judges. Judges are NOT permitted to judge both speech and debate events, but no judges may be entered in both Congress and other events. Debate judges may not be entered to judge multiple events from Policy, LD, and PFD.

In Policy and LD debate, we encourage all judges to reveal their decisions to the students after the debate. We will be posting results after each round. ALL judges for these events must submit a philosophy to tabroom.com. Teams who bring judges without paradigms on tabroom.com will not receive prefs. Several days before the tournament, online judge preference sheets will be made available for all teams in the TOC divisions of PF, LD, and Policy debate on tabroom.com. These should be submitted no later than 5pm January 4^th.

Obligations

In individual events, each participating institution is required to furnish one qualified judge for every five (5) individual entry slots, or fraction thereof. This is not a per student requirement, but per entry slot. All individual events judges will be expected to be available through the finals of individual events.
For Policy and Worlds, one judge is required for every two (2) debate teams entered, or fraction thereof. In Lincoln-Douglas and Public Forum, one judge is required for every three (3) entries, or fraction thereof. For Congressional Debate, one judge is required for every five (5) congresspersons entered, or fraction thereof. All debate judges will be expected to be available through the full first elimination round. Judges affiliated with teams in elimination rounds must be available for the round beyond their teams’ elimination. All judges should inform the tab staff before departing.

Missed ballots

We will charge $60per missed ballot. No students from a school with missed ballots will be allowed to compete in elimination rounds until their schools missed ballot fees are paid. Missed elim rounds that you are obligated for incur a $100 fine upon your school. Please impress upon your judges the significance of picking up their ballots on time.

Local judging

If you are traveling within the state of Arizona, we ask that you cover all of your slots. Because of the size of the tournament, we desperately need the help of the program directors to ensure that all judges affiliated with their school pick up their ballots each round. Judges for all events are asked to check-in at the ballot table before the first round. Since the ASU judging pool is limited, we urge you to find your own judges. We may not be able to accept very large entries not covered by qualified judges. In order to count as one judge, each judge must be available for the entire tournament schedule. Judges who are only available for a smaller part of the time, although welcome, will be considered one-half of a judge for the purposes of fee tabulation. Finally, please do not list Arizona State University Forensics members or coaches as your judges. They are already committed to running the tournament!