Teams should bring one qualified judge for every 3 LDers or PF teams, every 2 Policy teams, and every 5 Speech entries, rounded up in the case of fractional obligations.  Teams with Congress entries must bring 1 Congress judge.  You may not cover VLD entries with Novice-only judges.   You may, however, cover NLD judging entries with juniors or seniors who have 2 or more years of debate experience.  Qualified Speech judges may also be asked to judge Congress. Judges in all divisions are obligated to stay and judge one round past any round in which their students are actively competing.  We will assume judges are staying past their obligation unless we hear otherwise: let us know if you are leaving.

Keep in mind that a “qualified judge” understands the activity, speaks English, and is either experienced sitting in the back of the room with a ballot or flow pad as the case may be, or else has been carefully trained by the team he or she is accompanying. A qualified judge knows how to assign ranks or wins/losses, speaker points, and knows how to fill out a ballot. If you need some instructional materials in advance for your lay judges, feel free to use ours, but please do not try to sneak in an untrained ringer. When you provide an incompetent judge, we usually find out about it only after a number of competitors have been, in a word, shafted, while you have been basking in the glow of judging by trained or experienced judges.  This does not respect us, or the community, very much at all. We’ll likely respond in kind.

We’re also committed to hiring – and using! – a quality pool of judging across divisions.  To aid us in that effort, the registration system will  ask you to explicitly request judge hires.  Please request early; we will not harm the quality of our tournament by oversubscribing hired judging as certain other tournaments might do.  You may add judges to the tournament at any time, but because of the logistical challenges involved, judges dropped after registration is frozen on February 10th, even if you drop students to compensate, will incur a fee you will not want to pay.

We’ll also ask for judge cell phone numbers on registration, if you have them. Please collect as many as you can from your judges.

Schools whose judges fail to appear for an assigned round will be fined $25 for a prelim or $50 for an elim.  Judges fined may work it off by judging rounds beyond their assignment.  We don’t want your money, we want judges to show up.  However, schools with unpaid fines will not be given ballots or awards, and will be prevented from registering at other Northeast tournaments until those fines are paid.

To maintain a level of usability in the Varsity LD judge pool, we ask that each varsity judge be rated by you when you pre-register online.   This year we will also offer mutually-preferred judging in Varsity LD.   A complete judge list will be posted as soon as possible after the closing of registration. We will note on the list the rankings given by the submitting schools.

Any LDer who has made strikes but whose own judges fail to materialize at the tournament, will forfeit their preferences, including strikes.  We only accept ratings sheets online, not at the table.

Paradigms: Judges may or may not publish paradigms on the Judge Philosophies wiki as they see fit, although we urge them to do so, but in either case, they should be willing to indicate to competitors before a round a general sense of their vision of LD (if any) or a sense of their experience, to aid competitors in choosing how best to make their arguments.  Judges publishing paradigms, however, will likely be rated higher, and see better rounds, than those who do not.  Be warned.