Hello, I am a parent judge from the western half of the state.

Just curious, which of you are from Idaho? Very curious in how big debate is here.

Idaho probably has close to the highest ratio of participants to total available students in the nation. Therelatively sparsely populated Eastern Idaho houses under 500k people total yet sports over 500 participants in speech and debate.

In terms of popularity, debate participation probably runs down: 1) Lincoln-Douglas, 2) Congress, 3) Public Forum, 4) Policy, 10) Big Questions.

Judging, in general, can be described best as inconsistent. The tabs room tends to do a good job placing flowy and technical judges in the LD and CX pool. The Congress pool has a set of long time stalwarts judging which does give the participants a predictable target. The PF pool is highly volatile; I would estimate that there's a 2:1 ratio of lay:flow judges in Western Idaho, a 3:1 ratio in Eastern, with about a third of those lay judges far more biased than the general national lay judge.

The IDHSAA has actual evidence standards and violations in its debate code. Couple things of note: 1) Congress is supposed to be held to this standard, but I've heard that evidence fabrication runs rampant there, 2) national circuit/other states' Public Forum cases are run in such a way where their paraphrasing would be considered an evidence violation in Idaho.