The big bad wolf adjudication

I am annoyed and am intentionally writing this while I am still high on the issue. If anywhere half way through you disagree feel free to leave a comment or move to the x at the right top and move on to a blog with a lighter post. If it bores you, the previous instructions also apply. UPDATE: All the below mentioned applies to the adjudicators from the instituition that i am from too. As much as we crib about other uni's sending new/inexperienced adjudicators, i have to admit that we too are guilty of that at times. I just wish i had more time to spend with the juniors.

Hundreds of times I have seen debaters walk out of rooms dissatisfied with the adjudication received and proceed to curse the adjudicators that had delivered it to them. I used to think that it was all a case of sore loosing, and immediately would jump in to defend the adjudication. Unfortunately, I’m starting to agree that the standard of adjudication in the Malaysian debating scene is going down the drain.

Its disappointing to see more and more people adjudicating based on the superficial value of the debate. People give their decisions on the feel they had, on what the gut tells them, on which speeches sounded better, on which side they felt did a better job. All I have to say is that the analysis doesn’t stop after the debaters have left the floor. The depth of thought about the motion has to be carried beyond just the 8 speeches. Adjudicators have to analyze and debate with themselves within the context of how the debate was done before they can make the call. To make a decision simply because they felt it is simply wrong. If one wants to judge based on what they felt after a speech or based on how good the speech sounded then for the love of greens, sign up for the public speaking tourneys and not the debating tourneys.

When you do that you miss out on some of the basic fundamentals of adjudicating. Face value adjudication means you have not taken into the account most of the simple most basic technicalities that are involved. Things like how a damaging a POI was asked, how relevant was the answer to the POI to the teams case, whether the POI served the speakers team better or whether the answer was sufficient enough to be awarded. Things like dynamics within the team, how the speakers work together, how each speaker supports the speakers after them, how each speaker carries forward the case presented without repetition and redundancy, how each speaker supports their case with examples, whether or not those examples are relevant in today’s time and in the context of the debate. Things like whether arguments were responded to. Things like how much of the 7/8 minutes of the speech was actual substantive and how much was sounding like a broken tape recorder. Things like how rebuttals were dealt and how responses was handled.

Which leads me on very nicely to my next point. In my honest opinion, when someone adjudicates, you should fill in the score sheet before making your final decision on who won. It’s the most safest thing to do before coming up with your final decision. When you fill the score sheet, you are forced to think about the speeches in the breakdown that is before you. Then you are forced to actually judge based on whether they did fulfill those criteria. There is a reason why speeches are broken into matter, manner and method. If one judges a debate based simply on how they feel, its easy to forget the other areas involved when scoring. If you are awarding a speech a 78, its only fair to be able to justify how much of that was matter, manner and method. At the end of the day when you have filled in the scores based on the criteria, you may realize that the amount you awarded in points, does not tally with the decision you were feeling, and with the marks you had just lumped together. And in cases such as those you have to sit and think because something obviously is not right. It forces you to see the debate and the argumentation presented as a package and not just as individual speeches. And also, you owe it to the debaters to be able to tell/show them how they did in the respective parts of their speech. If you felt the manner was mediocre, the should know, if you felt matter was lacking, they should know. You may think that if they really want to know they can come and ask you, but sometimes, just putting it down on paper is helping them already. The decent thing to do, would be to present them with that kind of feedback after their debate, instead of a piece of paper with just the winning team written on it. Because with that, your services as the adjudicator of that debate was wasted, not shared with the debaters, and open to a lot of doubt.

Go ahead and think that I don’t know what I’m talking about because you have more debating experience then I do. All I’ve said is based my own experience adjudicating. And also because I feel its just plain common sense, but sometimes people fail to even exercise that. But let me just say one thing that I’ve witnessed enough times to know is true. Being a good debater does not automatically make you a good adjudicator. You want to pick a bone with me on that one, drop me a comment and we’ll discuss it over coffee.

It saddens me. It saddens me because the bad adjudication that is becoming more and more apparent nowadays may just cause the doom of Malaysian debating. With adjudication like this, you are not only stealing the wins of their rightful owner, but you’re also endorsing bad debating. Awarding wins to speeches that are clearly unsettling, bypassing basic fundamental mistakes, not penalizing faults that plain common sense would tell you is wrong – it gives room to the debater and to future debaters to think that that is the right way to do things. You unconsciously breed a sub standard group of Malaysian debaters because bad adjudication has allowed them to drop the ball and get away with a lot of things. The mentality that “I won by doing this so it must be right” is instilled and worst, passed on to the juniors.

I’m sick of witnessing bad adjudication and seeing teams that should win be passed over and shortchanged. Its tiring to get adjudicators say they gave it to the other team because of that one thing they did right, or that one thing they did wrong. If it was just one thing that decided the whole debate, dude, everyone should be either 1 point or half points a part and it must have been a really good or really bad debate,and you should by right have alot to say about it and not sit in a corner far far away from the rest of the batch. Its further nauseating when in such cases, the adjudicators are approached and aren’t even able to justify their decision.

Gawd do I have a bloody lot more to say on this. But its fast approaching 3 am and I have 8 hours of staring at the laptop to do at work tomorrow. Another time maybe, when another case of bad adjudication fuels me.


The above mentioned are all my personal views on the issue and in no way represent the institution I am from and is not a reaction to any one particular debate that I may have witnessed in the recent past.