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My high school Policy league (2010+) did not allow kritiks essentially at all. It was an extremely rare occurrence to run a negative plan (I'm not sure I ever s
by agg23 3y ago
My high school Policy league (2010+) did not allow kritiks essentially at all. It was an extremely rare occurrence to run a negative plan (I'm not sure I ever saw it myself). An aff kritik would absolutely not have been tolerated as we would ding them significantly on Topicality (sticking to the required resolution), which is voted on halfway through the round (so if aff loses, the round is over). I was one of the most resolution bending debators, with most of my aff plans going outside the bounds of what everyone else thought of for that topic.
I think my league was very abnormal however as we had a lot of layman, parent judges that we had to teach rules to (and sometimes the teams had conflicting interpretations), and we didn't allow more abusive techniques such as speed and spread (a common technique in Policy or Parli to present arguments as quickly as possible to prevent the opposite team from being able to address all of them, resulting in a de facto win). We would never have allowed someone to judge with a bio of "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for ... fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism", and it's insane to me that this was allowed at a top end tournament. There were certainly judges that brought their own priors (and we tried to keep track of them to help the rest of our club out), but they generally didn't announce it in such a damaging way.
- whimsicalism 3y agoYour league sounds typical of debate leagues, it is the national circuit that is abnormal.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoI agree. The GP post describes the HS policy league I participated in fairly well, except that we didn't have parent judges. We were a small, county league in a league that had all of 4 or 5 schools participating, so we were able to get by using coaches as judges. And, lest you ask the question, no, the coaches were not overtly biased toward their own teams. My partner and I definitely beat a few teams in front of their own coach as the judge, and we definitely lost a few rounds with our own coach judging. There were no explicit position statements by any judges, either. They only "position" was that the affirmative must advocate for the plan in order to win topicality.
- ajolly 3y agoDid you find speed or spread common in Parli? In any circuit I was in you would get dinged on that fast, and it was more of a dead giveaway that a policy debater was trying Parliamentary.
- agg23 3y agoI never got to do Parli unfortunately, so I can't speak to that. I have only the stories of my coaching team, which was the original coach followed by their star student of a college Parli team that performed very well on the national track (something like second or third for several years). I've seen videos of (maybe national track) high school Policy debaters speed and spreading through a massive ream of evidence, but obviously that doesn't indicate the frequency.