DEBATE POINTS PAGE
As of the Fall, 2002, NDT and CEDA are launching a new effort to centralize the debate results in a central database. This project will allow weekly updates and point rankings and will allow a host of new information to be publicly available. Among other things, the new system should be able to automatically generate bid sheets. Both Rich Edwards' TRPC and Gary Larson's STA have new features that allow the results of any tournament to be saved to a single data file formatted for easy upload into a central file. If you are a tournament director, you are strongly encouraged to submit your tournament results electronically.
Use the on-line tournament entry system
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For either the TRPC or SmartTabRoom, make SURE that you have entered the results, including the results for the final round. It will be helpful if you have entered all the judge information accurately and if you have entered side information accurately, especially for elimination rounds.
For the TRPC (Rich Edwards' program):
Make sure you have the most recent version of Rich's program downloaded. To get the most recent version of the software, click here. If you don't have the program installed yet, click the button on the far left titled "download TRPC in one big file." If you have installed the program already but want the most recent version, click the middle button labelled "download TRPC update only file." You can do this even after you have entered all the results for the tournament.
From the TRPC main menu, click on "Results," then "Main results printouts," then "Print packet results." Just above the "Cancel and return to main menu" button is a blue button labelled "Click here to create a text file for NDT points results." (The button will work for both NDT and CEDA points.) You should be automatically returned to the TRPC main menu when the saving is complete. You will now have a file called: "C:\Program Files\TRPC\TRPCData\Ptsfile." Email that file as an attachment to Jon Bruschke at jbruschke@fullerton.edu.
For the TRM (Rich Edwards' Macintosh program):
From the format menu, select "convert data to TRM96." If you are using a recent version of the program, there will be 9 files that begin with "TRPC" in a folder called "conversion." Either email all 9 files as attachments to jbruschke@fullerton.edu, put them on a PC-formatted floppy and send them snail-mail to the address below, or send a zip disk to the snail-mail address below.
For the STA (Gary Larson's program):
Click here to download the most recent version. Your current download should be more recent than 9/18/2002.
Tournament procedures:
During elim rounds, STA does not REQUIRE you to indicate a side when you tabulate an elim round done with STA. The web reporting system does require this information, so please record who is affirmative when you record a decision.
Tournament directors often don’t use STA for judge assignment, particularly in late elimination rounds. For the sake of web reporting, please complete STA screens all the way through the completion of the final round. If you are not using STA for judge assignments, you can use the MANUAL ELIM function to assign the judges after the fact.
Occasionally, tournament directors make mistakes in entering teams, judges, etc. To simplify the task for the automated system, if you note that you have a school name that is an error (one that has no teams or judges assigned to it), it would be helpful to delete that school prior to submitting results. If you have fears that it might affect operations, you can delete the errant school after the tournament but before you transit results.
Transmission procedures: At the end of the tournament, after all elim rounds have been tabulated (including finals), you can select from the main menu the option: Web-based Cum Sheets. The option will blink red while it is processing. Once it returns to blue, you will have a file that can be transmitted to Bruschke for recording in the automatic tournament reporting system. The address of the file will be: c:\debate\debate\datafile.txt. You can transmit this file as an e-mail attachment.
If you absolutely cannot create an electronic data file using one of these two methods you can fax a hard copy of your results to Jon Bruschke at 714-278-3377. If you also have no fax access, you can mail a hard copy to:
Dr. Jon Bruschke
Dept. of Speech Communication
PO Box 6868
CP 420-1
CSU, Fullerton
Fullerton, CA 92834-6868
In the past, checking sheets had been emailed out to all NDT or CEDA subscribers. Checking sheets are now available on line, on the Debate Points page. The right-hand column lists links to NDT and CEDA point checking sheets; the sheets break down NDT and CEDA points by team, school, and tournament. If a division, tournament, or elim round is designated with the word "true" that division or elimination round counts for points. If designated as "false" it does not count for points.
Directors are encouraged to review the sheets and report any inaccuracies to Jon Bruschke (email addresss above).
The CEDA constitution
provides the guidelines for the calculation of CEDA points, but some
interpretation is necessary. The following interepretations of the CEDA
point rules are reflected in these calculations of CEDA points.
1) Currently, there is
a minimum entry size for tournaments but not for divisions.
All entries in all divisions currently count for CEDA points, regardless of the
size of the division.
2) Section IV-3-B of the CEDA constitutino gives 2 teams a point each even if they accumulated no victories but doesn't specify whether they have to finish half the rounds to be eligible. In this system, teams have to appear in at least 1 round to get the point.
3) The constitution says that the top 2 teams with the most prelim wins are counted; by the advice of Greg Acthen and Jeff Jarman, this system counts the top 2 point-recipients at the tournament instead.
Notes on the Bruschke Rankings
WHY?
There are rankings of schools with NDT points and CEDA points, but no rankings of individual teams, except for the pre-bid rankings to the NDT. The team rankings I offer are a supplement to those ranking systems. With all tournament results entered into a single database, there are a number of calculations that can be made that would have heretofore been too labor intensive to try. I offer them not as a definitively superior system, but as a starting point so that we as a community can start imagining new and different ways of measuring success. One kind of cool thing is that it allows the comparison of Novice and JV teams in a way that has almost never happened heretofore.
HOW
ARE THEY CALCULATED?
The basic assumption of the system is that the best measure of tournament quality is tournament size. The more teams, the better the tournament. While this may not be a perfectly valid assumption, I will mention that, (a) teams go to tournaments that are well run, including the good teams, (b) tournaments with good competition tend to attract good competition, and (c) I don’t believe that anyone can seriously name a time they went to a 200-team tournament that really sucked. More on this in the next section, but for now I will mention that the system is only as good as this assumption.
The first calculation is to compute a percentile finish for each team at each tournament. If there are 121 teams at a tournament, they are ranked 1-121, and assigned a percentile finish. Obviously, first and second place are determined by who won the final round, third and fourth are determined by ranking the semi-finalists by normal criteria (prelim wins first, then adjusted points, then total points), fifth through eighth by ranking the quarter-finalists, and so on, finally ranking all the teams that didn’t clear. The team in first gets a percentile rank of 100%, and each team gets a percentile by dividing their finish by the total number of teams (team 17 at a 121-team tournament, for example, gets an 86% score). This is, by the way, how the SAT is scored.
The next step is to have tournaments weighted one of two ways, one to calculate a total point score, and one to compute an average score.
For the total points score, each tournament is given a weighting. The best-attended tournament of the year receives a weighting of 1.00, and each other tournament is weighted by dividing the number of teams at that tournament with the highest-rated tournament. For example, if the best-attended tournament had 211 teams at it, a tournament with 113 teams would have a weighting of 113 divided by 211, or .54. Points are calculated by summing percentile ranks at each tournament multiplied by the weighting for the tournament. Here’s an example:
Percentile finish Tournament weight score
84.23 1.00 84.23
90 0.73 65.7
81.31 0.65 52.85
97.3 0.93 90.49
Total: 293.27
The second way is to compute a weighted average. A weighted average is useful when comparing scores with different sample sizes. Imagine, for example, you wanted to know the average test scores for a certain ethnic group, and 3 different studies calculated 3 different averages of 98, 112, and 103 with samples of 33, 412, and 1,232. A weighted average would take into account the different sample sizes for each average. The formula is simple: Multiply each average by the sample size, and then divide by the summed sample size. Thus, in this example it would be:
(98*33)+(112*412)+(103*1232) = 105.1
33+412+1232
Obviously, this has the advantage of counting the third sample roughly three times more than the second sample (since it’s three times as large) and roughly 37 times more than the first sample (since it’s roughly 37 times as large).
For the weighted average method of points, the percentile finishes of each tournament are weighted by the number of teams at the tournament. In this system, the weights of each tournament are multiplied by 100 to arrive at weightings.
Percentile finish Weight Score (column 1 times column 2)
84.23 100 8423
90 73 6570
81.31 65 5285.2
97.3 93 9048.9
Totals: 331 29327.1
Weighted average = (29327.1/331) =88.60
Of the two systems, the total points approach rewards teams for attending more tournaments, and the weighted average approach rewards teams for consistently scoring well at tournaments. Both systems reward teams for doing well at large tournaments. Both systems prevent teams from racking up points by cleaning up at small tournaments.
On the "Bruschke rank tally sheets" the number of points for each team at each tournament is listed. Under "elim" a 1 means the team reached finals, 2 means the team reached semis, 3 means the team reached quarters, 4 means octos, 5 is doubles, and 6 is triples. "Pwins" refers to wins in prelim rounds, and team speaker and adjusted points are displayed.
IS
TOURNAMENT SIZE THE BEST MEASURE OF TOURNAMENT QUALITY?
Well, maybe not, I think that they’re the best measure that we have. See points A, B, and C above. The system breaks down if a tournament has 100 crappy teams attend, but I again assert that as an empirical point that doesn’t really happen. The point is an empirical one, but I believe that at well-run tournaments teams start to attend, which raises the quality of competition, and then more teams start to attend to debate against the good competition, so that if you hit a tournament with a size of about 60 teams you have one where there’s excellent regional competition with a good national draw and if you hit over 100 teams then everybody who’s anybody is there.
WHAT
ABOUT ROUND ROBINS?
I hate round robins. The best teams get together to debate each other and get better and nobody else can get as good as those teams are getting because they can’t get a bunch of consecutive rounds against good teams. And invitations to round robins always leave out deserving teams, so you can’t really say a team left out but deserving should miss out on the points they would have earned had they been invited. All the same teams go to all the same major invitationals anyway and should be debating each other from octos on if they really are the best teams in the nation. In my view, little is lost by not including them in ranking systems, and much is to be gained in community inclusiveness by not having them altogether.
In the current ranking system, round robins count the same as any other small tournament.
I will begrudgingly say that there IS a way that they can be incorporated into the current system. Simply make the weighting for each tournament depend on two things instead of one: The number of teams at the tournament AND the average point totals for the teams attending the tournament. Each factor could count equally or some unequal weighting could be generated (tournament weights could, for example, depend 75% on the average points of teams in attendance plus 25% based on size). This is not done here due mostly to my basic dislike for round robins, but analytically it poses no problem.
WHAT
ABOUT THE NDT?
It’s true that the NDT is NOT one of the 5-6 largest tournaments of the year, and this system that weights tournaments solely by size may not weight it as heavily. However, there are three points to be made.
First, it doesn’t really matter what the rankings are AFTER the NDT. Much as nobody cares about the coaches’ poll when the NCAA basketball tournament is over (because you know who the national champion is and no longer have to rely on polls) you don’t really need rankings AFTER the NDT because you know who the champion is.
Second, the NDT is NOT a small tournament. It’s weighting would be fairly substantial, although not determinative in end of the year rankings.
Third, there are at least two ways the system could be altered to incorporate the NDT (which are not used in the current system). (a) The NDT could be assigned a weight equal to or ever larger than the largest tournament of the year. Since the top weight is always 1.0, the NDT could be given a weight of 1.0, or even a weight as large as 2.0 (making it count twice as much as the largest tournament). (b) If the quality of competition weightings, as described in the round robin section above, were adopted, the NDT weighting would shoot right up there.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Undoubtedly, this project will strike some as elitist. I guess in some ways it is. My only defense is that we are pretty much an elitist activity at our core – virtually every tournament declares a champion and calls one team better than all the rest. We have at least 2 major tournaments to crown national champions. Part (but only part) of the value of our activity comes from its competitive nature, and part of competition is that when someone wins someone loses. Whether there is a Bruschke ranking system or not, there will be attempts to figure out who the best teams are at various points in the season, if only for invitations to the vice-ridden round robins.
Right now, those decisions are made in ways that involve either politics, gut instincts, or judgment calls. What this system introduces is an attempt to find an objective way to rank the teams, one that doesn’t rely on who you know, who you drink with, how you did last year, or what high school camp you went to. It depends exclusively on how you’ve finished at the tournaments you’ve attended. It isn’t perfect, it won’t correct the other imbalances in our community, but it represents a way to try to provide an equitable way to rank the teams during the course of the season. I hope it will stimulate discussion of what our community is and what we should be about.