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Re: MPJ and Accountability

	Your post goes on and on (and on) about why accountability is 
good.  But the link is not very clear.  Just how is ABCX supposed to 
improve or enhance accountability?  At times, reading your post, I have 
the impression that you're trying an impact turn: you're pointing to just 
the factors that MPJ opponents point to as fostering elitism, and you're 
saying those factors are actually good (because they produce 
accountability).  The strategy that most of us MPJ proponents have been 
following, though, is to deny that those factors operate.  They don't 
operate to produce cliques, they don't operate to produce elites, so they 
don't operate to give us accountability either.  They are nonexistant.

> as educators handout A's, B's and C's.  In the debate round we pick a
> winner and loser and handout "quality" points which create a hierarchy of
> achievement.  Why should we be immune from such a system?

	So you think ABCX does create a hierarchy?  That's what the ABCX 
opponents also think.  That's why they oppose it.  

> community familiarize and introduce themselves to them.  I also think that
> inexperienced judges should start out with inexperienced teams such as
> novice and JV.

	At any given tournament, I've long observed, if I judge equally 
in novice/JV and in varsity, the round that I will find most difficult to 
decide will be one of the novice rounds.  The varsity folks are pretty 
clear about indicating what they mean, but novices leave me anguishing 
about, say, whether some utterance constitutes a topicality argument or 
not.

	 There's just as good an argument that says that our beginning 
judges should be in varsity, where the debaters know how to adapt to 
them, and our best educator/judges should be in novice, where they can 
provide the proper guidance and instruction to the debaters who need it most.


> familiarity.  The more you know the judging "style" of a critic, the more
> comfortable you are with them and rank them accordingly, strikes become B's
> and A's.

	How can strikes become B's if moving "up" is based on familiarity 
and striking prevents that familiarity from happening?

	I like accountability, but I don't think ABCX has much to do with 
it.  Let's just implement the idea I've already expressed here, and which 
Tuna tells me he has expressed long before.  Give the debaters ballots 
for assessing their judge.  Every judge is required to reveal and discuss 
the decision with the debaters after the round.  After that discussion 
takes place, the judge writes up her ballot while the debaters write 
theirs.  The debaters also give points to their judge.  At the end of the 
tournament an award is given to the highest point-getting judge.  
(Interesting technical adjustment: let the points from losing teams count 
twice, since making the losing team feel they've been justly treated is a 
better test than making the winning team feel they've been judged rightly.)

	- Meredith Garmon, Fisk U.
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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