Recent content by Victor Dalrymple

Anyone have the state team results?

It is true the decline in judge quality has complex causes - but this is not an excuse for the largest schools comp in NSW to do absolutely nothing to address the issue. All you need to do is read the report of the previous CA of ISDA to see a host of proposed solutions to this problem. Exactly...

How have the rankings been determined when we don't know margins? In many pools teams are tied on wins, but certain schools have been indicated as breaking. Is this guesswork or is there some method involved?

I believe this is the first year ever where the NSW State Squad has not had a speaker from Sydney Grammar School.

It is true that the decline in school judging is not a recent phenomenon, but it appears to be worsening at an accelerating rate. It was not always the case that judging was bad in these competitions. CAS has panels on all 1sts debates, but not the others. I've found often quarters are the...

Well the same judges who judge Senior debates also judge the junior debates... But yes the complaints I have heard about judging concern all year levels.

Normally ISDA would publish results after each round as a Google Sheet. This year the CA does not appear to be doing so - which is rather unfortunate. Thankfully we do have the unofficial table - which while not fully updated, provides us with something.

Have heard a series of complaints about judging at ISDA last night. One must wonder how bad judge quality can get before a competition becomes rather pointless. Surprised no one has tried to do anything about it.

Yes, I expect Mikey will continue to set difficult motions this year. Last year many of the Eastside motions were taken from major University tournaments like Australs.

Has anyone got the callback list for state trials?

Last night again had some poorly balanced topics. I believe state trial are this weekend though - so we will hopefully get some exciting information out of them.

Mikey Xu is the CA of Eastside. He was also the CA of CAS and Eastside last year. Recruiting was probably helped by the ISDA and FED CAs being inexperienced. I would caution the commentariat from measuring judging skill off of debating ability though!

So far ISDA has had very poor judge quality, and FED has been even worse. It appears all of the best judges are doing Eastside this year - we will find out this Friday.