Re: Plan/Plan is the answer. (was Re: WHITHER THE CASE)

[Alan Dove <ad52@columbia.edu>]

On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Phil Kerpen wrote:

> The Sixth Negative Alternative: Plan/Plan.
> 
> Galloway is correct that we are at a crisis point of affirmative bias.  I
> contend that plan/plan provides a remedy to the side skew better than any
> other alternative.  P/p is equal ground by definition; both teams have the

I'm not going to get into the on-point plan-plan discussion, but I want
some clarification of this basis, beyond the folklore and random tidbits
of examples I've seen posted.  Has anyone done a solid study of tournament
results, ideally from both NDT and CEDA, compared over a period of, say,
the last 5-10 years?  Someone awhile ago claimed that affirmatives win a
bit over 60% of the time in elim rounds, but I wonder a) if this is
generally true, and b) if this is the appropriate way to analyze the
issue.  How many tournaments were used to reach that conclusion?  How
large were those tournaments?  When was this research done, and what time
period was covered?  If these sound like trivial "blips," think again: a
result from five years ago on a CEDA "value" topic would not have much
application to the current debate, and should probably be disregarded.  On
the other hand, if a transition from value to policy topics has
corresponded with a rise in affirmative dominance, we need to look at
that.  Some other things to think about:

1) Each team will spend half the time in prelims on each side.  This would
cancel out any advantage of affirmative over negative in prelims since, on
a purely mathematical basis, you would expect a team to go 3-3 or 4-4 if
that were the only criterion.  Has there been a decline in the number of
teams with perfect prelim records at similarly structured tournaments (as
your hypothesis of affirmative dominance would predict)? 

2) If there is a real disparity in elimination rounds, whom does it
affect?  Are the top Open teams experiencing the same difficulties on the
negative as freshman Novice teams?  If not, it would suggest that it may
just be a little more difficult to learn how to argue on the negative -
not necessarily something we would want to "compensate for."  A vertical
analysis of the success rates of randomly-selected teams in elim rounds,
correlated with the number of times they went affirmative, would help
address this question. 

3) If anyone can provide references to published studies on this, I would
appreciate it.  This message isn't an attempt to make a counterclaim
(yet), just a call for critical evaluation of this claim we all seem to be
taking for granted.

          --Alan

__________________
Alan Dove
N3IMU
ad52@columbia.edu
http://128.59.173.136/Poliolab/Alan/Dove.html

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References:

• Plan/Plan is the answer. (was Re: WHITHER THE CASE)
• From: Phil Kerpen <pgkst5+@pitt.edu>

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