Judging

Training & Accreditation

The National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) offers these free courses with accreditation you can add to your Tabroom.com judge profile. Each course listed below takes about 15 minutes to complete.

Level 1-Intro to Judging Congress

Level 2-Judging Congressional Debate

Intro to Multicultural Competence

The Harvard Debate Council has created an additional free course in serving as a parliamentarian; it takes about a half hour to complete.

Serving as a Parliamentarian

All Congress Judges (Scorers + Parliamentarians)

Responsibilities each round:

Scorers each award 1-6 points (where 1=poor; 6=excellent) for each speech and hour of presiding as well as rank-order their choices of top eight (8) performing delegates -- including the student presiding officer if they're worthy -- (where 1=top choice, 2=next choice... 8=eighth choice).
A parliamentarian provides holistic feedback without awarding points, rank-orders all delegates in the room, in order of preference. The parliamentarian remains in the same chamber for preliminary rounds.
All judges will be expected to type comments in electronic ballots while students are speaking. Judges may NOT write comments by hand and transcribe them later. If there are connectivity issues, judges may type comments in a word processing document and copy/paste to Tabroom, but the entire tournament will be severely delayed if we wait for transcription of handwritten notes.