Olivia Sundberg Diez

ca@scottisheudc2018.com

Guide to being a Chief Adjudicator

This document includes (i) a tournament checklist of things you should not forget to do (mostly for relatively
inexperienced Chief Adjudicators, though it can still serve as a guide and a reminder); and (ii) a guide to motion
testing (hopefully useful to most Chief Adjudicators).

Tournament checklist
Your key responsibility as Chief Adjudicator is over the motions and the judges. However, you will also need to
support and oversee the smooth running of the tournament. You likely have experience as CA across several
tournaments, so you have a unique ability and responsibility to be on top of things. This checklist can help.

Before the tournament

Tournaments need to run on a tight schedule, and you will be kept incredibly busy throughout the day as issues
come up. Make sure to do as much in advance as possible. Dont rely on having time at the tournament.

Organisation
Check the team cap, number of rounds, tab, equity team, and functionality of the schedule. You will
need at least 2 hours per round of 7 minute speeches (1h45 for 5 minute speeches), at least 30 minutes
between registration closing and the draw for Round 1, and at least 30 minutes between the last round
and the break announcement.
Send judge rankings in advance to the tab team; ask what software they are using so that you know
what numerical rankings for the judges will mean in that programme.
Check what the equity policy requires of you, such as discussing motions with them in advance.
Will you need speaker scales or feedback forms? Ask the org comm to print them in advance.

Judges
Check available judges from hosting institution; ask org comm for a list of institutional judges.
Check the judge funding budget (and make sure to understand if the number is inclusive or exclusive of
reg waivers) and make an application form if necessary.
Make a spreadsheet to keep track of judges that have been invited and confirmed. It may help to come
up with a list of judges youd like to approach together with the rest of your CA team, and split up the
judges based on who is most likely to convince them to come. This ensures that (1) judges arent
inundated with four people asking them to come and (2) that the rest of the CA team agrees you should
approach certain judges before you do so.
Rank the judges based on their CV and personal experience of the CA team. These are initial rankings
to aid in drawing Round 1, that are likely to change throughout the tournament as feedback comes in.
You need a judge feedback system
Talk to the tab team in advance since this is often operated by them.
If online, is there good enough internet, or is there a spare computer you can allocate for
participants to use? If on paper, you need a box.
You likely will want to have a threshold for when judge feedback can affect someones ranking
- bad feedback from a team who took a fourth is less valuable than consistent feedback across
rounds.
Judges may ask for their feedback after the tournament, so make sure you keep track of this
in some format so you can give an anonymised version.
Motions
Start discussing motions on a shared Google Spreadsheet roughly one month before the tournament.
 Olivia Sundberg Diez
ca@scottisheudc2018.com

It can be a good idea to make motion suggestions anonymous, to remove unhelpful over-attachment
or considerations about motion quotas for each CA.
Meet on Skype or in person 1-2 weeks before the tournament to finalise the rounds.
Prepare and agree on a few safe back-up motions in case you think of new problems with a motion, or
it is set at a tournament the weekend before.
Allocate motions to rounds
The first round of every day can be slightly easier to let people warm up.
The final in-round should not be too risky, and strive to be as balanced as possible (at the
expense of novelty, if that is the trade-off) to make sure no-one feels cheated out of the break
(especially since its usually a closed round, where the rationale isnt explained, and blaming
the motion is very easy)
If rounds will be debated late in the day, motions should not be too complex.
Round 1 and Quarter-finals (if applicable) will likely include teams from very diverse levels, so
those motions should be clear and not give too much discretion to OG to interpret, as their
interpretation can harm their back half team.
Aim to never go into a tournament with motion work left to be done. It will add stress, reduce
accountability, and make overlap or imbalance issues much more likely.
Think carefully about the content of information slides. They can dramatically change what the debate
is about or nudge people to talk about some things disproportionately. Long and unnecessary
information can also cause as much confusion as an absence of a definition, especially if English is not
everyones first language. Equally, be mindful of information slides hinting at arguments; this can
unfairly tip a debate to one side.

Policies to think about

Iron-manning: will you count their speaker and team points? Will you allow them to iron-man the out-
rounds if their partner cannot speak?
Novice criteria if there is a novice break.
Will you want to have shadow judging panels, motion debriefs after each round, or similar policies
aimed at increasing the learning opportunities for participants?
You will need a speaker and judging briefing.

During the tournament

After every round, head back to the tab room ASAP to make sure things run to time.
Check and track feedback *every round*, put yourself to judge with promising judges, and ensure all
teams get a high standard of judging throughout the tournament. At larger tournaments, you will rely
on judges you trust to watch other judges and give you feedback
Check that novice status and/or iron-manning teams scores are correct.
When the break is done, check it for errors or ties (the breaking order matters for the out-round draw,
so make sure to resolve ties preferably by the EUDC and WUDC process).
Double check judges are not clashed when building out-round panels. This also means that if there are
judges with clashes, its useful for them to judge earlier out-rounds while they still can, instead of risking
the option that they wont be able to judge an out-round at all.

After the tournament

Check motion statistics, ask for feedback from participants, be honest about errors, and learn from
what went wrong. Everyone makes mistakes and sets motions that were broken. The goal is to keep
developing and avoid repeating those errors in the future.
If you worked with a great CA, tabber, convenor or equity officer, pass it on! There is not enough
feedback going around, and it is great to know who should be promoted again.
 Olivia Sundberg Diez
ca@scottisheudc2018.com

Motion Testing
Often people set motions because they are excited about a policy idea or because they want to hear a certain
argument be made. These motions tend to be imbalanced, or to end up never hitting that argument, because
teams will decide to prioritise different material that makes more sense to proving their burdens in the debate.
A CA is not good because they set exciting, novel, or topical ideas. A CA is good because they understand the
logic of the debate, and the arguments that teams *will be able to make* and *have an incentive to make*.
Good CAs set motions based on the debate that is most likely to play out, not on the argument they envision in
their heads. Remember this when analysing motions, since your favourite motion idea will not always correlate
with the debate teams will enjoy, thrive in and remember the most!

Things to look out for when developing motions:

Overlap
Has this motion been set recently? Is it likely there are any teams here that also attended that
tournament, or were likely to hear of this motion being set there? Was it set at the same tournament
last year?
You need not, however, go for exclusively novel motions when there are safe alternatives that have not
been set in a long time. You may be sick of relatively standard debates, but younger debaters may have
never heard it before, and will find it novel and interesting.
Is your set of motions diverse, or do they overlap too much with each other? Are there two rounds that
require similar arguments or have similar clashes? Also take into account that the order in which you
set motions can influence each other. Even if motions are diverse in a vacuum, debaters might become
primed by one motion to come up with similar arguments for the next.
Are you missing entire themes or topic areas? Make sure you cover a range of topics (for example:
international relations, feminism and LGBT rights, democracy, science, criminal justice, economics), so
as not to disproportionately (dis)advantage teams with certain strengths and weaknesses.
A good test, especially for big tournaments, is to make a list of the 10 biggest problems or issues in the
world right now. Are you covering at least some of them?

Balance and Depth

Make a list of proposition and opposition arguments. Do not include points that are non-comparative
(i.e. both sides can claim those benefits) or irrelevant (i.e. are too small or marginal to determine the
result of the debate). Are there enough and a similar number of compelling things to say on both sides?
Double-check balance. So there *are* responses available to all arguments, but are they accessible to
equally good teams? Its not helpful for there to be a very sophisticated proposition argument to a very
strong and obvious opposition line; teams at a constant level will hit the opp case but not the prop case,
so the motion is still opposition heavy.
Is the motion deep enough? Could OG or OO express most of those arguments in their speeches? Are
there one or two arguments that are obviously more important than the others, and therefore the team
that says them first is likely to win? Balance between opening half and closing half is as important as
balance between sides.
Does the motion put too high a burden on Opening Government to work out what the problem is you
are trying to solve? Is it clear what mechanism and examples you expect?
Imagine you are Opening Opposition. Try to break the motion or go hard on an alternative policy. What
do you counter-prop? Can you achieve the same benefits as proposition wants in a smarter way? If
there is an obvious counter-prop, the motion is breakable, and there is a problem-solution mismatch
in the motion, meaning that you will not get the clash you want.
Is there a double burden? Hint: If there is an and or the motion includes several examples, there is
 Olivia Sundberg Diez
ca@scottisheudc2018.com

likely a double burden. This means proposition has to prove both parts of the motion to win, whereas
opposition only needs to disprove one. For example: TH, as Western Liberal Democracies, would cease
all direct military action in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen allows opposition teams to win by conceding
Iraq, Yemen and Libya but arguing that military action in Syria is still necessary; whereas proposition
must win on all four examples.
Is the world going to change quite drastically? This might make it difficult for opening half to both
analyse the new world and make arguments. This might be alright as out-round where teams have that
skillset (depending on the level of the tournament), but would probably be weighted to back half as an
in-round.
Note: Balance and depth matters in every round, from Round 1 to the Finals. If you have a prop-heavy
motion, dont toss it in for Round 1 where it doesnt matter. It does.

Accessibility
Take a look at the list of teams that will be attending the tournament and make sure the motions are
roughly tailored to their level. It is as important that teams in the bottom rooms have as much fun as
teams in the top rooms but motions can also be a good pedagogical opportunity, so dont be afraid
to set difficult things where all teams can have a shot.
Do any of your motions require a lot of spec knowledge? How would you approach this motion if you
had not read the article or studied the course that made you think of this motion? If peoples
misconceptions will make this a bad debate you should not set it, even if you love it, or you should
set it with the right information slide.
Envision the debate playing out in different rooms across the tournaments. Is it shallow, prop- or opp-
heavy in top, middle or bottom rooms? Is it messy in bottom rooms? Would you know how to approach
this motion if you were an average 70- or 80-point speaker? Can all of those different teams come up
with the necessary arguments in 15 minutes?
Is the wording of the motion clear to non-native speakers? It is usually worth erring on the side of
caution and adding definitions for technical terms. Often CAs prioritise stylish wordings over clear ones;
try to avoid this trap and choose the clunkier wording if it makes it clearer to debaters what you mean.
Using simple verbs (such as make, do) is one useful tip to simplify a motion. Another tip is to go for
synonyms with as few syllables as possible.
A common practice is to deal with concerns about accessibility by setting a motion for an out-round,
but this is often not a solution: it is possible for a motion to be inaccessible in many of the ways above
for out-round speakers too! (Particularly out-round speakers for one bench and not the other)

Functionality
Research your motion. If there is an actor involved (e.g. NATO, the IMF, the UN) is it the right actor? Is
this policy the status quo? Would it be too impractical or impossible for it to happen? Lastly: Are you
100% correct that your facts and the premise of the motion are correct? If a quick Google turns up facts
that totally change the debate, those facts need to be in an information slide (or that debate needs to
not be set).
Is this a real life issue? What examples are there where this policy would take place / have an impact?
Is there anyone who would want this to happen or has argued for this before?

Reasonableness
Is it an actually insane policy? Is it a war crime? Is it from Hitlers social policy book? Do not set.
Does your motion require anybody to argue something offensive? If teams will have to defend clearly
immoral, racist or sexist behaviour or opinions, do not set. It will not be fun, and it will not be a balanced
debate. That isnt to say that policies for which racist/sexist reasoning *exist* shouldnt be debated,
just so long as there are non-bigoted ways to defend it.
 Olivia Sundberg Diez
ca@scottisheudc2018.com

Does your motion require teams to discuss very sensitive and personal issues, such as abortion, sexual
assault, domestic violence or suicide? Consider whether the motion is worth setting given the likely
upset that will be caused, or whether it can be approached more sensitively. You may want to give the
Equity Officer the opportunity to warn people beforehand.

Lastly: On the motion-testing and motion-setting mindset

Just because a motion has been set before, it does not mean it is safe, good, or adequately tested. If
you can, ask people who set it or debated it before how it went, but also make sure to test it yourself.
Yes, that final motion might have problems, but do you have anything better?. Very often, motions
that all CAs agree are imbalanced, shallow or broken end up being set, because no other alternative is
available. You need to have an alternative, or the bad motion will happen anyway even if you spend a
day discussing all its problems.
Lets just reword it / Lets put this down as a backup for now. Over-attachment to ones own motions
can be an issue. Sometimes rewording can help, but sometimes you need to draw a line under it and
accept it is a non-starter. Make sure to think carefully about *whether*, not how, they can be
reworded.
Equally, some of the best contributions a CA can make is to redraft and improve a motion suggested by
someone else. Most motions are not viable in their initial wording, and having a second person look
over them makes a tremendous difference. Abandon the idea that this is your motion or their
motion, and try to see the best and the potential in each others.
Be careful with over-reliance on spreadsheets - or even worse, over-reliance on sorting it out on the
day. Meeting in person or over Skype several days before the tournament is an irreplaceable step.
Be careful with groupthink. Often one CA will suggest a motion, and a second CA will point out an issue
(e.g. a viable unintended counter-prop). The group will work to reword the motion and be satisfied that
theyve addressed this issue without realising theyve created another one. A good solution can be to
have at least one person trusted by the group to look at the motions at a late stage before they are set,
without having been part of the discussions that led to the motions creation.
Lastly: Be critical and suspicious of last minute motion ideas arising throughout the tournament. It takes
time and sometimes research to assess if a motion is balanced, deep, feasible, etc., and a motions
issues may be masked by its novelty and your excitement. It happens far too often for a motion to be
dismissed after a thorough examination, only to be replaced by a new idea that has not faced
comparable scrutiny. Hence the importance of testing every motion in detail - even motions that you
all agree are good - and of working in advance of the tournament as much as possible.

We hope the above will make sense and be a helpful guide. Please question, criticise, improve and use your
judgement - this is merely our best advice which will continue to develop, and not objective rules. If you have
clarifications, concerns, feedback, or a request for anecdotes of where we really messed up a motion, please get
in touch. Wed love to hear from you!

With love,

Olivia Sundberg
ca@scottisheudc2018.com

We are extremely grateful to the rest of the Scottish EUDC 2018 Chief Adjudication
team and to Alex Harris for their thoughtful and thorough contributions to this guide.
Your help, time and support is invaluable, both in writing this document, as in
everything we do.