The quality bar in most nationally competitive debate — the type for which students might get college scholarships or do well in national qualifiers-only tournaments — is far higher than in online discussions. Students enter with thousands of pages of evidence and must frame arguments in terms of a few common logical structures that can have a lot of emergent complexity. It’s more like adversarial mathematical proof writing situated in the context of policy making than what people typically call “debate”. Even the delivery of speeches is, I bet, not at all what you would expect. See eg https://www.youtube.com/live/Kc-QrcxrkCw?feature=share
This is sometimes true even in cases where students aren’t allowed to bring outside evidence into the round due to students’ prior experience in evidence based formats.
I tried using this system to vet some common debate mainstays — a politics disadvantage about the debt ceiling, a federalism counter plan, a very condensed 1ac from this years topic, and a very condensed 1nc shell.
On the disad in particular this system double turns itself (google “double turn debate” for various explanations). This is a very novice mistake. The judge doesn’t notice.
On the 1NC response the system ignores topicality, which is an instant loss. The equivalent of a plaintiff ignoring a pre trial motion to dismiss because they are too busy writing up cross examination questions for the defense witnesses. Again, the judge didn’t notice.
The system isn’t working for me anymore but I bet you’d get similar issues with v/vc style LD cases, where the system doesn’t understand simple theory about how the value and criterion interact; particularly subsumption style arguments
Even on more lay types of debates the system and judge fail, as documented in other comments.
I wouldn’t recommend using this system to practice competitive debate.
