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.  Congress judges may be swapped into another judging pool; please indicate which other pool a Congress judge would like to judge if we cannot use him/her in Congress when registering.  Likewise, 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 community ratings and strikes in Varsity LD.   Any Varsity LDer with proper judge coverage (yours or hired), will be able to strike 3 judges. 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.  If you say your judge is a 1, that’s what the list will say. Strikes must be in our hands by 9:00 p.m. February 10th in order to be included in Round 1. Please register your strikes on tabroom.com in registration once the judge list is posted; if you’re not getting a strike option when you go into your online registration, it probably means your judging is not covered; you need to do that first.

Any LDer who has made strikes but whose own judges fail to materialize at the tournament, will forfeit their strikes.  Other students will be allowed to enter strikes at the registration table on February 12th, but we can only guarantee that their strikes will go into effect by round 3.  Strikes may not last through elimination rounds, but we’ll see what we can do. Usually this is not a problem.

LD Community rankings: In an effort to equalize the judging pool without giving any particular advantage to anyone, we use a system of ranking the judges by popular consent. Our belief is that “A” judges should be adjudicating so-called bubble rounds (down 1 or 2), as these are the debaters still in contention for elimination rounds. “C” judges are best placed for adjudicating where the stakes are less high. And “Bs” fit where they fit. Rather than the tab room deciding arbitrarily who’s what on our own initiative, we will leave it to you. We will post a list of judges (with their 1, 2, or 3 ratings) on February 8th. Each school (not each individual) may rate each judge A, B or C. We will simply rank a judge where he or she gets the majority of votes; that is, no complicated math, just rate them as the arithmetic sees them. We set no limits; you can rank as many as you want whatever you want. Rankings are due with strikes, by 2/10 at 9:00 p.m, and may similarly be entered on tabroom.com. As for elimination rounds, we will pair as equitably as possible; every round should get the same proportion of A/B/C.

Judges added to the list after 2/7 will be ranked by the tab room.

Paradigms: Judges may or may not publish paradigms 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.  If you do have a published paradigm, send it or a link to us on registration or by email to penn@tabroom.com so they’re all collated in one place.  Judges publishing paradigms, however, will likely be rated higher, and see better rounds, than those who do not.  Be warned.