The Atlanta Urban Debate League is committed to providing excellent debate education programs, services, and opportunities to diverse students, educators, and members of the community!
Middle School Varsity Curriculum
Judge Instruction
At higher levels of debate, you should tell the judge how to evaluate the round. This includes explaining how the judge should determine which impacts are the most important and why you are winning the round overall.
Taking MR. T to the Next Level
While MR. T has three parts, the most strategic thing to do isn’t to try to win all three parts, but to emphasize the one or two parts that make the most sense for your specific impact and explain to the judge why that part is more important than the others.
Most impacts won’t really have the biggest magnitude, highest risk, and shortest timeframe. Here are some examples of how you can think of the strongest part of MR. T for different impacts:
Nuclear war isn’t the most likely and isn’t necessarily going to happen tomorrow, but it obviously has a large magnitude in terms of both scope and severity.
Various forms of inequality may not have the highest magnitude because they don’t directly kill many people, but we know that inequality exists in the status quo, so we can say it obviously has a higher risk and more immediate timeframe than a hypothetical impact.
The scientific consensus on catastrophic climate change is that it will definitely kill humanity, giving it a huge magnitude and risk, but the worst effects of climate change are in the far off future, so even if we have limited time to fight climate change, there’s a long timeframe before we actually feel the effects of the impact.
Think about how you would explain why certain parts of MR. T are more important than others. To get you started, here are some ways people argue that a judge should prioritize one aspect:
The magnitude of the impact is so bad that we should do whatever we can to make sure it never happens, no matter how unlikely or far off it is.
We should prioritize stopping the most likely impacts over hypothetical disasters that would be horrible but will probably never happen.
We should deal with the things that will affect us soonest first, and then deal with other impacts later. We have time to stop some bigger magnitude or higher risk impacts later, but our impact needs to be addressed first.
Strategic Explanations
In your rebuttals, you should explain to the judge why, given what arguments have been made in the round, they should vote for you. Paint a picture for the judge of what the world would look like if they voted affirmative versus if they voted negative. This should come down to why you are winning some offense/impact and the other team is not. Each side only has an impact to weigh if they have successfully defended the entire scenario they presented in the first constructive. Let’s break down what that means:
The affirmative needs to be winning that there is some problem (harms) that is not being addressed in the status quo (inherency) that would be solved by the plan. If the negative takes out any part of SHIP/HIPS, the scenario falls apart.
The negative has various options depending on what they’ve run:
For a disadvantage, the negative needs to be winning that the status quo is okay as long as we don’t change things (uniqueness), that the plan will change things (link), and that the change will ultimately lead to (internal link) some problem (impact). If the affirmative takes out any of these parts, the disadvantage scenario falls apart.
For a counterplan, the negative needs to be winning that the counterplan would solve the affirmative harms and that the counterplan can only be done alone and not along with the affirmative plan (mutually exclusive) to reap the net benefit of the counterplan.
For a kritik, the negative needs to be winning that the affirmative case makes problematic assumptions (link) connected to some larger theory that is ultimately harmful (impact) and should be rejected in favor of an alternative advocacy that will help resolve the impact if it is done without the plan.
When you are explaining to the judge why you are winning, you should emphasize that you are winning every part of your offense (aff: case/SHIP/HIPS, neg: disadvantage, counterplan, and/or kritik) and that the other team is not winning any offense because you took out some necessary part of their scenario. Without that necessary part, they don’t have an impact to weigh against yours.