Adjudication Primer for new Adjudicators (ACTDU 3 on 3 Competitions)


By Jeremy Farrell


Right now you are all inexperienced, unsure trainee adjudicators. However after you finish this document you will be inexperienced, unsure trainee adjudicators who have read a document. This is important to remember, because the best way to become a good adjudicator is through experience with debating, both as an adjudicator and debater, and no seminar or test or instructions can substitute for that experience. This is merely an introductory paper to an art form that will continue to teach you new things for as long as you participate in it, and as long as you are willing to learn from it. Lastly, this is not an exhaustive guide. Many things are not addressed in it. It is merely a supplement to other notes you can find on the website, the adjudication seminar, your shadow adjudication, etc.


This primer touches on a lot of technical comments and rules and scoring methods, but at the end of the day a decision is based on what is effectively a gut feeling (albeit one which is generated through the filter of your accumulated debating and adjudicating knowledge). A lot of adjudicators make the mistake of taking a copious amount of notes, and after the debate they go over them, re-reading them until they have determined a winner based on adding up points and factoring in technical errors. This is not to suggest taking notes is by any means a bad idea, in my experience it is an excellent idea, I simply mean that at the end of the debate you should know who won the debate if you have been paying attention to it without needing to refer to your notes. Trying to relive the debate through your notes is likely to skew your decision if anything. I once saw an adjudicator who after the debate spent 30 minutes re-reading their notes in private (he actually ushered all the debaters out of the room while he did this) and then called them in and announced he had come to a conclusion. The affirmative side had won based on “a distinct manner advantage in the 3rd speakers’ speech”. This sort of adjudication, as will be elaborated on later, is poorly reasoned, lazy and unhelpful. Reading your notes is mainly useful to explain your decision to your audience, give more precise feedback and to write scores. But the outcome of the debate should be clear to the adjudicator once the last speaker has finished speaking.


Conduct for Adjudicators:

This comes first because in many ways it is the most important. You should always be nice to kids in a debate, even if the teams have been horrible. Sandwich criticisms between compliments, nod reassuringly if one speaker is falling to bits in front of the audience (this is a school competition after all), and make students want to come back next week. Even if one team has been awful, broken down in tears and spoken for 1 minute, you should find something positive and reassuring to say (e.g. "your manner was solid, it was good how you came back and really gave it a go, even after you burst into tears.  Debating is very challenging when you're new to it, but you get better quickly".)


During the debate you should not:

It is probably safest to not show any feelings one way or the other and keep a passive or neutral expression (although understandably sometimes a good joke is hard not to laugh at).




When watching a debate, an adjudicator assumes the role of the ordinary, reasonably informed individual and does not bring any special, outside knowledge to the debate, only knowledge that an ordinary, reasonably informed individual would have in advance. This is again subjective, and to some degree depends on the age of the competition. Obviously the ordinary, reasonably informed person in year 11-12 should be aware of the Iraq War, and if one team tries to claim there has never been an Iraq War then you need not assess the claims based only on what is said in the debate. However specific knowledge, like whether the death penalty exists in Botswana would not be something the ordinary, reasonably informed person would have any pre-existing knowledge about. That does not mean that one team cannot establish it as true in the debate, merely that you should not bring your own pre-existing knowledge to bear on the claim.


Conduct for Debaters

Adjudicators all have their own benchmark for what is acceptable conduct and what is not. This is relevant for the application of 2 basic principles.

  1. Calling Order, and

  2. Disqualifying a team for conduct breach

During the debate when an adjudicator calls order it means that everyone in the room except the speaker who is currently speaking should be silent. This can happen for a number of reasons. The noise in the room might have increased too much, the teams may be mumbling to each other with sufficient volume to unfairly disrupt the speaker, or the opposing team may be badgering them with POIs (points of information). Different adjudicators have different standards for what badgering consists of, and what might constitute badgering in a year 9-10 competition is probably different to what might constitute badgering in a year 11-12 competition. There is no fixed standard for calling order.


The second issue concerns disqualification for conduct breach. As an adjudicator you will almost never come across this issue, and the standards are even more vague and unclear than when one should call for order. The sorts of reasons one would contemplate disqualifying one team include, but are not exclusive to:

The problem with such standards is that no rules we give you can account for context. Some teams may know each other very well and be very happy with joking personal attacks on one another. The exact same words, delivered in a different context, might constitute conduct that could lead to a disqualification. One example which divided many adjudicators occurred one evening when a male speaker at a university competition was offered a POI by a female speaker. The male speaker declined it by replying “No, I won’t take you now, perhaps I’ll take you later tonight”. Some felt the remark was a harmless and witty joke, others felt the remark constituted sexual harassment and was actionable. The context of the debate may also be a factor, as the topic may require arguments that might be prima facie offensive (for example, a topic on abortion, gay marriage or whether people with serious genetic diseases should be allowed to have children). If a team denied that a single child had ever been removed from their home, in a debate about compensating the stolen generation, I personally do not feel that would rise to the level of conduct breach. It would be a bad argument, and the team would be struggling to win, but I do not feel it would be at all appropriate to disqualify them.


Matter, Manner, Method…

As everyone knows, debating is decided on manner, matter and method, and as those who have watched The Dead Poet’s Society can also tell us, poetry is measured by “perfection” and “importance” on horizontal and vertical graphs. In reality just like poetry, debating is an essentially 

subjective art and can’t be measured by some sort of mathematical calculation of formulas and points. Manner, Matter and Method exist to provide guidelines and a justification for how a debate is decided, but while in debating some decisions may appear (and may well be) inarguable in their outcome, it is not due to some sort of mathematical formula, and an adjudication which is given on such grounds is invariably the sign of a poor adjudicator (and debater) who is forced to rely on formulae and technicalities to mask their lack of a higher understanding in a debate. A famously bad adjudication once consisted of an adjudicator getting up and telling his audience “Affirmative team…Manner good, matter not so good, method ok… the negative team wins”. In theory each of these different debating competencies is measured in point totals of 40, 40 and 20 to indicate their importance. In reality it is impossible to separate and individually mark them as such. A speech that has poor matter will invariably affect manner, because no matter how nice someone’s voice they will sound foolish if they get up and start spewing nonsense. Likewise, if good material is mumbled incoherently it will lose the matter value it possessed. An attempt to separate the components of matter, manner and method in such a way is both artificial and futile. This is not to say that matter, manner and method do not exist. They do, and it is important to address them in your feedback (though this does not mean feedback needs to be structured “manner, matter and method”!), however one must be careful not to take an overly technical approach to them in a debate.


Common Pitfalls

There is no such thing as an automatic loss in debating. Challenging the definition, failing to challenge the definition, not presenting a model, not presenting a test, and so on, while they might in certain contexts be damaging to one team, do not amount to an “automatic loss”. While there are 3 broad types of debates (normative/should debates, empirical/is debates, and “ideas” debates), be careful not to become too fixated with a technical approach to the wording to determine if a debate is a test debate or a model debate. Sometimes the answer will be counterintuitive, and often a debate which could be argued as one type of debate will work just as well as another type. For example, consider the motion “That what happens in the pacific is not Australia’s problem”. The topic would frankly be less messy and more easily debated as a normative debate despite the presence of the word “is” in the topic. It proves difficult to debate what happens in the pacific without proposing a) what Australia’s current position is, b) what Australia’s new position should be (eg, a model), and thus to explain that (which one must in order to give the debate a firm and more precise context) and then propose a test is to basically try and have a model and test debate at the same time. Likewise, sometimes the motion will necessarily require the Affirmative to propose the status quo (e.g. “That we should stay the course in Iraq”). Sometimes proposing the status quo at affirmative makes for a bad motion or bad affirmative case, but sometimes it is perfectly acceptable. There is no “automatic loss” for proposing the status quo. There is no “automatic loss” for proposing a counter model (sometimes a counter model is not only advisable but necessary). I would always advise a team to propose a counter model in a debate on introducing carbon credits, because a) you need an alternative solution (even if only implicit), and b) arguing that global warming isn’t happening is both difficult/wrong (depending on who you ask) and boring (a debate on scientific facts… yay).


Feedback

When giving the adjudication to an audience you shouldn’t go any longer than 5-8 minutes at most. There is a limited amount of time, and personal feedback for speakers is much more valuable because you are able to pinpoint exactly what each speaker can improve on. During a general adjudication you should not highlight what individual speakers have done wrong, though you might wish to mention some things that were done well. The basic things you should be doing in your general adjudication are:

In personal feedback you can be much more specific and open with the speakers about things they did well, and things they could have improved upon. You are not required to show the teams their scores, although many adjudicators do (they’ll be able to see the team score on the website anyway). Remember not to overload speakers by covering everything they could fix, limit feedback to a few things for them to improve next time.


Scoring


Scoring, much like matter, manner and method, is largely fudged based on the results, however bearing in mind the above remarks about not being overly technical this section gives a loose guide about how to square scoring with performance.


The maximum margin between 2 teams is 10 points. No exceptions. In other competitions this is a loose rule, and in some competitions much greater margins are allowed, however this is a school competition and no matter how much you may feel a greater margin was deserved you should not go beyond 10 points. Likewise a score of 70 is the lowest score an individual speaker may attain, and 80 is the highest individual speaker score. No exceptions. An average speech is worth 75 marks. It should be average based on the level of the competition, thus a Ford speaker (yr 7-8) would have a different standard to a Murray speaker (yr 9-10). A team who was average for their competition would receive a total of 225, while a team who was 2 points above average would receive a 227, and the individual scores would then be fudged to fit within the team scores. A margin of 1 point is as close as you can give a debate (no half marks are allowed in the ACTDU competitions). A margin of 2 would be “close but clear”. A margin of 3 points would be reasonably clear. Anything beyond 3 points would be quite a clear debate. A margin of 7 would indicate a debate where the winning team has had an overwhelming advantage across all areas of the debate. Anything beyond 7 is quite rare, and constitutes a complete, total and unquestioned win. Speaker scores below 72 or above 78 would be very rare also. Anything beyond a 78 should be one of the best speeches you have seen at the competition in question, and a score of 80 would indicate an effectively perfect speech. If one team has obtained a score you feel is about 5 points above average, but the losing team was about 8 points below average, then you must fudge the scores because the current margin is 13 points (which is unacceptable). The sensible compromise is usually to drag the lower team up until the margin is more reasonable, rather than drag the stronger teams’ scores downwards.