Congressional Debate Judging Guide 

Congress judges assess quality of research and analysis of issues, argumentation (including advancing debate), skill in asking and answering questions, use of parliamentary procedure, and clarity of delivery.

Implicit Bias: We are all influenced by implicit bias, or the stereotypes that unconsciously affect our decisions. When judging, our implicit biases negatively impact students who are traditionally marginalized and disenfranchised. Before writing comments or ranking, please take a moment to reflect on any biases that may impact your decision-making process. Student physical appearance, and if online, video quality, NEVER should enter into how you evaluate.

Types of Judges

All judges evaluate and rank independent of each other.

• Parliamentarian: responsible for starting a session, advising student presiding officer (PO), ensuring fairness; and holistically assessing debate. At the end of the last preliminary round (or end of elimination round), ranks through total participating legislators.
• Scorer: evaluates every speech, as well as PO’s performance. At the end of the round, they rank the 1st through 8th best legislators (which may include PO).

What Judges Evaluate

Presiding Officer (PO)

Students elect peers PO, entrusting them with facilitating debate through recognizing and timing speeches, questions, and motions in a fair and efficient manner. They sacrifice opportunities to speak in service to colleagues. Weak POs erode a chamber's capacity for meaningful debate. Lack of order leads to chaos. POs time and give signals for speeches and questions under supervision of the parliamentarian; judges do not time speeches. Experienced contestants often shy away from presiding because they wish to debate and due to perception that judges won't rank POs because either they don't understand the value of the position or they are uncertain as to how to compare the PO to other competitors in the room. When a judge does not rank the PO, they must include an explanation as to why the PO failed to keep order in the chamber or demonstrated a lack of leadership. **If you do not rank the PO and do not include an explanation in your comments to the PO, tournament staff may contact you following submission of your ranking ballot.

Presiding Standards for Evaluation

1. Speaker Recognition: methods are clearly explained at the beginning of the session and executed consistently and transparently. The PO is consistent in recognition (very few errors) and rulings, equitably distributing speeches, questions, and motions throughout the room. The PO should open the round clearly explaining recognition process. Tournaments, each round, may: require an election for PO, provide a different seating chart, have preset recency numbers for each contestant. Priority rules when more than one speaker/questioner seeks the floor:

1. First recognize those who have not spoken during the session
2. Next recognize students who have spoken fewer times (precedence)
3. Then recognize students who spoke earlier (least recently – recency)
4. Before above benchmarks are established— use a fair, consistent, and justifiable process.

2. Parliamentary Procedure: command of parliamentary procedure (motions) to transparently run a fair and efficient session, seldom consulting written rules and ruling immediately on whether motions pass or fail, but consulting the parliamentarian when necessary to ensure accuracy.

1. Motions: PO should pause briefly between speeches to recognize motions, and not call for them (at the beginning of a round, the PO may remind members to seek their attention between speeches).
2. Voting: explain and conduct efficient voting on various matters, including counted votes on legislative action.

3. Delivery/Presence: dynamically fosters order and trust, and relates to peers well through vocal and physical presence. Word choice is economical and eloquent. The PO does not hesitate to rule abusive or inappropriate motions out of order. They foster trust by peers.

Speakers

Types of Speeches

All speeches are 3 minutes, have equal value, and demonstrate different skill sets:

• Authorship/Sponsorship: constructs advocacy by explaining need for the legislation to solve/mitigate a problem, and how it will do that; followed by 2 minutes of questioning.
• First Negative: constructs opposition by explaining how solving/mitigating a problem with the legislation will fail to meet objectives or will make the problem worse; followed by 2 minutes of questioning.
• All speeches following the first two have 1 minute of questioning.
• Rebuttal: directly refutes opponents’ arguments by explaining why they are incorrect – and not simply listing names of opposing legislators and/or saying they’re wrong.
• Extension: taking a previous argument on the same side and extending the concept to a related concept or more in-depth exploration. These speeches are not rehash if new nuance is introduced.
• Speeches may be a combination of rebuttal and extension.
• Crystallization: summarizing positions of both sides, and weighing the impacts to prove why one side wins over the other. This speech establishes key voting issues in the round.

Types of Questioning Periods

• Traditional – preliminary rounds – one delegate may ask one question at a time; often used in preliminary rounds.
• Direct – elimination rounds – questioning periods divided into 30-sec. blocks of exchange between the questioner and floor speaker; often used in elimination rounds.

Point Values/Scores: Speaking and Presiding

6 – Exemplary; may have slight, nuanced room for improvement (recommend if necessary)

5 – Accomplished: could use a few improvements (suggest tactics)

4 – Competent: meets expectations, but should develop more depth/knowledge (offer specifics)

3 – Developing: barely meets minimum standards, and requires more growth (explain in detail)

2 – Emerging: underdeveloped skills [short arguments; lack of evidence; PO – ineffective understanding/carrying out procedure/recognition of delegates] (describe what is needed)

1 – Unacceptable: offensive mockery or attack of peers, or (for speeches) spoke on wrong side

Going over time: When speakers extend considerably beyond 3 minutes, their score should be lowered, and they should be downranked for monopolizing time by decreasing opportunities for others to speak.

Important Principles

• Be kind, constructive, specific, and encouraging. One specific comment about a particular argument or how the contestant organized certain ideas is more helpful than generic comments. Please AVOID comments such as "good speech," "practice more," "needs work." Instead, articulate what tactics the student used that were effective, what specific skills they need to improve, and/or what did not connect or make sense for you in their analysis.
• Debate exists to advance arguments. Students should be prepared on both sides of legislation.
• Students should feel comfortable moving the previous question when debate has become one-sided or debate has become stale – even if other students wish to speak. This is not rude.
• IMPORTANT:  Students do NOT need to speak on each item of legislation. In fact, many tournaments limit debate on each legislation to prevent this from happening, and this also gives students the ability to not speak on a topic that might be a personal trigger for them.
• There is no “minimum cycle”, nor a “maximum cycle” rule, except at certain tournaments.
• There are not motions to “open the floor for debate,” “open the floor for presiding officer nominations,” nor “open the floor for agenda nominations.” These are part of the normal, established order of business for Congressional Debate, so the PO simply announces they will do these things.

Developed by Adam Jacobi with portions adapted from Dr. Alexandra Sencer.