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Topic Votes & Middle Ground


You all may find this of some interest...

As today was the last day of class for our debate team, Chico State today determined how it will vote for the topic areas. The process we use is that each student is given a ballot which they may fill out the same way that schools fill out their topic area ballots for CEDA. They may rank as many or as few of the topic areas as they wish so long as they sequentially rank them beginning with 1. Some students ranked all five topics, and some ranked only one.

Topics are then assigned points based upon their ranks (1 = 5 points, 2 = 4 points, etc.) Topics are also assigned tie breakers according to how many people ranked the topic 1st. (Any topic which any student ranks 1st or 2nd is garaunteed to be ranked on the ballot. Topics which no one ranks above 3rd will not be ranked on the ballot.) In the case of unbreakable ties the coaching staff (Gina and I) will arbitrarily intervene. Luckily that has never been necessary.

These were our results:

1. Domestic Terrorism, 30 points, 1 tie breaker.
2. Civil Rights, 23 points, 4 tie breakers.
3. Southeast Asia, 23 points, 3 tie breakers.
4. Space, 15 points, 0 tie breakers.
5. Treaties, 9 points, 1 tie breaker.

The really unusual thing to note here is that the #1 topic was only ranked #1 by a single student (out of 9) and yet accumulated far more points here at Chico than any of the topics which were ranked first by many more students. This is a result of the Domestic Terrorism topic pulling a huge middle ground, with nearly everyone ranking it either second or third. Even absent the one person who ranked it first, it would still have ranked first on our squad (though not by nearly the margin).

This is not just academically interesting, but points (I believe) to a real possibility this fall for a topic to sneak up and win based on 2nd and 3rd place rankings because the 1sts have been so heavily split. My prediction: The topic which wins will _not_ be the topic which received the most 1st place rankings. Of course... Heisenberg may prove me wrong.

Just thought this was interesting...

Pat Gehrke 
CSU Chico
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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