Clark

Kathryn Clark Affiliation: Valley High School and Dartmouth College Experience: 4 years of judging high school sporadically

A couple of things you should know if I am judging you:

1. Either kritik or DA and CP debates are fine. You should debate the way you want to debate. I am willing to listen to either. With either strategy, I prefer specificity over generic claims. Specific links or link explanation is important for either kritiks or disads.

2. There are some arguments that I think are incredibly stupid. I will still vote on these arguments if you win them but your speaker points may suffer. Arguments in this category include: time cube, overspecification, artificially competitive counterplans, (steal the funding, etc.) and cheap shot voting issues.

3. It will be very difficult to persuade me to vote on conditionality, dispositionality, and PICs. 20-30 seconds of 2NR coverage is probably sufficient to win these issues unless it was basically the whole 1AR. I probably give the aff a little more leeway on perm arguments than most judges. I'm extremely unlikely to vote on severence or intrinsicness, especially if the aff says "do both" at some point in the debate. I'm much more sympathetic to the aff on international fiat.

4. I really, really hate consultation counterplans and condition counterplans. The neg can certainly win that these are okay, but it might be an uphill battle.

5. Please be nice. Debates are more enjoyable for everyone this way. This means not getting into fights in cross-ex. Cross-ex questions are not better just because you ask them with disdain. Likewise, I appreciate teams that disclose their plan, answer reasonable questions about what politics scenarios they have been reading, etc. Obviously things like cross-reading are unacceptable and if I catch you doing something like this the results will not be pretty. If you only read part of a card please mark it during your speech or immediately afterward.

6. I think the strict offense/defense paradigm is kind of silly. Obviously, it’s tough to win if the CP solves your case and you just have a couple of impact takeouts on the DA. But if there’s no internal link, there’s no internal link. A devastating takeout can be worth a thousand bad turns. Likewise, I don’t understand why the neg should have to win offense on theory or why the aff should have to win offense on topicality. I will default to this way of evaluating debates. However, I can be persuaded to evaluate debates in terms of offense/defense if that’s what you want me to do.

7. I will flow all speeches and read evidence (although I'm not one of those people who can flow every single word - so if something's important, make it more than three words long). Warrants in speeches and in cards are important. Debaters are most persuasive when they explain an argument well and then reference a card to back it up. It’s also important for debaters to compare evidence quality (and just saying “their card is bad” does not count) but if they don’t do that I will do it myself.

8. I haven’t judged much on this topic. I judged this summer at DJW and DDI and at the Harvard round robin and Harvard high school tournament, but that’s it. So if you have an extremely specific and technical strategy, don't assume I know everything about the topic. Likewise, I don't know what the "community consensus" is on T.

I wrote this quickly so I probably left some stuff out. If you have specific questions about something, please ask before the debate and I'll be happy to tell you.