Injustices in the Judge Pool

“My judge was my opponent's coach.” “I watched my judge compliment my opponent’s clothing multiple times, and then they won.” “My judge wrote that I should choose a topic that more people know about.”

Judges play a crucial role in the Speech and Debate community. They give their time to help us improve, learn, have fun, and hold an endless amount of tournaments. From local to state to national, they are always there. They can be former competitors, coaches, teachers, parent volunteers, and much more. While we are grateful for the opportunities that these people give us, problems arise when these same people take part in biased judging practices. There are multiple ways in which biased judging takes place and each of them are far too common to not address.

Judging a competitor from their school

When school’s provide judges for a tournament, they are often spread evenly throughout all events to ensure that each event has enough judges. However, far too often, a judge is either randomly or purposefully assigned to a room with a student from the school that they were hired by. This inherently creates a conflict of interest because even if it’s subconscious, someone is much more likely to think higher of a person that goes to the school that they are representing or hired from. For example, a parent judge may either subconsciously or consciously want to rank a student from their own school higher because it will help their child’s school do better in the tournament overall.

Judging someone who they’ve coached

Similar to judging someone from their own school, when a judge has coached a student that they are now judging, a bias is created. This is because that judge has worked with, knows, and shared knowledge with that student. This situation is destined to end up favoring the student of the coach because the success of that student can and will reflect on the coach’s abilities as well. Additionally, it is likely that the student will be utilizing specific skills or techniques that the coach taught them, which will influence the way in which the judge analyzes the round.

Judging someone unfairly because they are competition for one’s own school

When someone is judging a competitor who is deemed tough competition, it is very easy for that judge to purposefully rank them lower so that they don’t pose a threat to their own school. While this situation is difficult to detect and can take place with any type of judge, it can be avoided through our solutions at the bottom of this article.

Judging someone based on gender, physical appearance, race, etc.

Unfortunately, out of all types of judging biases, this is probably the most common. This behavior can be clear on ballots through statements like: you are too aggressive, you aren’t aggressive enough, or you didn’t look professional enough. While judging biases related to race, sexual orientation, and even religion, can be difficult to detect, diversity training is a crucial solution to this.

Now that we’ve addressed some of the ways in which biased judging can take place, what are the solutions? The Speech Space has a few recommendations that we think are really important in working towards solving these problems:

Judge Training

Currently, schools aren’t required to teach their judges which creates a disadvantage for students that aren’t from that school. This is because they’re getting judged by inexperienced judges. Proper judge training clearly lays out the acceptable and unacceptable practices, how to judge properly, and how each event works. A large component of this should also be diversity training to ensure that judges are educated on how to give proper feedback on a ballot taking into account cultural differences, and how to be aware/reduce the impacts of their own stereotypes.

Tournament Staffer

We believe that there should be a person in charge of assigning and monitoring judges and their feedback. This will ensure that judges are put in rounds that will keep the tournament fair, and that their feedback is proper and reflects a fair round. Because many of the tournaments are run by Speechwire or Tabroom, this person would also be able to ensure that the computerized systems don’t assign people in ways that can contribute to biased judging.

Incident Reporting

Some tournaments are beginning to have an ethic officers, but this needs to become a more common practice. Students need a formal and consistent way of reporting incidents of biased judging so that it can be taken care of immediately.

At the end of the day, in order to create the most enriching experience for all, judges must be objective. As a community, we must work harder to ensure that people aren’t disenfranchised as they take part in an activity that is meant to empower.