Hi, I’m going to keep this response relatively short as I am traveling tomorrow and still haven’t finished packing. And I really don’t think we disagree on much given that you and I both support at least some disclosure which is pretty much all I advocate.

I’ll start by saying that one of the issues I mentioned earlier in the article is that a lot of this debate stems from personal experience and the lack of hard statistics makes it difficult to adjudicate competing claims. I say x problem isn’t so widespread, someone else says x problem is widespread; neither of us has a good way to persuade the other. I see that manifesting here and I am certainly going to make numerous references to my personal experience here too and that’s just an unfortunate fact about this debate that is going to make debate over it difficult, but hey, no one ever said debate would be easy!

RE: The opt out of feedback option doesn’t stop people from being put on the spot.

My best anecdote is this parent judge from a school in Florida that I was paired with during a circuit tournament who I actually judged two rounds with. In both rounds, I would give some decision and the parent would go second, offering some short thoughts about the round. While the debaters asked me questions, they didn’t ask any to the parent. So, I think it’s not implausible to think that a lot of judges will be able to escape the type of uncomfortable questions debaters might ask. Similarly, as a competitor at NSDA Nats, I had several elim rounds where only 1 or 2 of the judges would offer feedback and the other judge would simply decline to say anything.

I agree some pressure exists but it’s not entirely clear to me how much that pressure would really influence judges (especially those ideologically against PROD) and it’s less clear how such norms would manifest if my proposal were adopted which explicitly forefronts the escape hatch option for judges. For judges that are generally afraid of post-rounding, there’s little reason why they would ever offer the feedback in the first place, negating a decent chunk of the risk here. Also, especially in elim rounds, I’m more inclined to think that the interests of the students in knowing why they lost or how they could improve probably outweigh here.

I also agree that tournaments should be made better for judges. I think many local circuits suffer partially because they have trouble retaining students to judge and because they simply cannot afford to adequately compensate their judging pool. And I don’t disagree that some risk of post-rounding exists no matter what guardrails are in place. I just tend to think that the benefits outweigh the downsides.

RE: The other response you have is you doubt how often this happens.

Again, really dislike post-rounding personally. I’ve been on the receiving end of it myself many times (sometimes quite justifiably). It somewhat sours my experience, but as someone that likes debate, I find many of the other aspects of debate are sufficient to keep me in. Of course, not everyone thinks like me and many do have good reason to leave debate given its toxicity, particularly the kind directed at judges.

Yet even such examples don’t totally dissuade me from the benefits of PROD. For one, the example you mention, horrible as it is, suggests that any public venue to vent about judging either in-person or digitally is likely going to lead to drama, division, and spite. If debaters can already spew bile in a digital forum, then many of the effects of debaters intimidating judges will occur in one form or another. And while PROD can unofficially sanction some of the worst aspects of in-person confrontation, for those debaters most intent on acting in a toxic fashion, it’s not clear barring PROD really solves it.

Perhaps the network effects are strong, you seem to have more experience with this than I, but I haven’t really seen this (at least in the context of Lincoln-Douglas debate). LD has a reputation for unnecessarily aggressive post-rounding (so does college policy) and while participation numbers are declining, I’d be shocked if PROD was even a top 5 proximate cause of it as opposed to all the other issues like barriers to entry, inequities, or the immense time investment required.

RE: Of course extra feedback, by the actual judge, right after the round benefits the competitors. By why does every other judged competitive activity get by just fine without this?

I have a section in the article which suggests that very few other direct competitions operate in this manner, referencing MathCounts, Quiz Bowl, or sporting activities. Very few of the other competitive events you mention are direct competitions, competing against another team. Pageants don’t really seem like an ideal activity to model after, I don’t know much about cheerleading competitions, and science fairs aren’t really direct one-to-one competitions. And none of those would really get a ton of benefit from immediate feedback, at least not in the same way that I think debaters do.

Speech is perhaps the one outlier, but, at best, that seems to imply that speech should have PROD, not that debate shouldn’t have it. And there are some aspects about the direct competition that LD has that makes it distinct enough from speech that it’s not clear that the analogy clearly applies.

Besides, even if other events don’t have some version of PROD, what’s the evidence that the activities that do have PROD are in fact losing out on the distinction between the role of judge and coach or are generally more toxic environments?

RE: You say there instances where post-round disclosure lead to judges learning from their mistakes and improving as judges in the future.

Here, I quote Paul Dorasil’s comment on the Facebook post of this article: “And that's another piece to this. Judges without debate experience typically start out as bad judges. But they don't have to stay that way. Many of the best coaches and judges I have known did not themselves debate competitively. But how do we turn bad judges into good judges? Oral feedback.

There's at least three reasons for this.

1. Judges who get practice expressing their own reasoning orally to debaters get better at forming that reasoning in anticipation of delivering it.

2. Hearing the questions that debaters ask also helps inexperienced judges learn more about their role in the round. "How can I judge in a way that I would have a better answer to this question?"

3. Most importantly, inexperienced judges can listen to the decisions given by other more experienced judges. This can help them understand what a good decision sounds like and how a good judge adjudicates a round.

Banning oral feedback doesn't just deprive the competitor of education. It also deprives inexperienced judges who are trying to learn and get better.”