High School Open Curriculum Guide

Advanced Impact Comparison

Impact comparison tells the judge which of the harms/impacts is more important than the others. Winning that your impact is the one the judge should be most concerned about is crucial to winning the debate. Teams should start doing impact comparison in the 2AC and 2NC and continue it throughout the round. The principles of impact comparison (MR. T) still apply in more competitive debates; this section has additional guidance on how to effectively compare impacts.

Structure of an Overview

An impact overview should be the first part of a speech. It has 2-3 parts.

• Summarize your impact scenario – re-explain to the judge how your impact happens and what it is according to your 1AC/1NC evidence.

• (Optional) Turn – you can “turn” an opponent’s offense into a reason to vote for you by explaining how voting for you is the best way to prevent the impact.

  • Disadvantage turns the case – the events triggered by the plan cause the very impact that the 1AC claimed to solve.

  • Case turns the disadvantage – these arguments are typically introduced in the 2AC after the overview on the disadvantage flow and then used in affirmative impact comparisons in later speeches.

    • Link turn – the plan changes the status quo in a positive way (and potentially preventing/solving the negative impact).

  • Impact turns (either side can turn an impact) – the thing the other team claims is a negative consequence is actually a good thing.

• Impact comparison – telling the judge which impact is more important using MR. T.

  • Pick the parts of MR. T that are stronger for your impact instead of trying to win all 3 every time.

Upping Your Impact Calculus

• Remember that impact calculus only compares the ultimate negative consequences, not the factors that one team says lead to the impact.

  • Ex. If the negative disadvantage says the plan ruins the economy, leading to war, impact calculus would talk about the magnitude, risk, and timeframe of the war, not the economic decline.

• Tell the judge why one part of MR. T is more important than the others!

  • Should we prioritize likelier scenarios with a smaller magnitude or make sure the worst-case scenarios don’t happen even if they’re unlikely to happen?

• Consider what kind of impacts are in the round and tell the judge why they should prefer one over another:

  • Event impacts lay out a specific chain of events that will happen if we do/do not pass the plan. They tend to be high magnitude and happen quickly, but have a lower probability of occurring.

  • Structural impacts are not about specific scenarios, but consider how certain factors make an impact more likely to happen. These can ultimately lead to event or systemic impacts, but have a stronger case for probability because they do not rely on one specific chain of events. Relying on structural factors means that these explanations have a slow timeframe.

  • Systemic impacts are not about any isolated incident, but subtler effects that are seen on a daily basis, over and over. These may be considered to have small magnitude, but they are almost always already occurring in the status quo, meaning that they have the strongest risk and timeframe.

• Other things to consider:

  • How do the impacts interact with each other? Does one impact include or lead to another?

    • Ex. When comparing climate change and global poverty, one side could argue that the effects of climate change (e.g., flooding) destroy homes and make people climate refugees, so the effects of climate change include increasing global poverty.

  • Internal link chain – does the set of steps leading to an impact make sense? Is there a leap in logic or major assumption that the impact relies on?

    • Are there intervening actors who could prevent the impact from happening? Are there checks and balances built in to prevent impulsive or irreversible decisions from being made?

  • Can you solve one impact and still have time to deal with the other?