Debate Contest (COMPLETED)

This being a Debate Mansion, the highest votes went to Debate Contests. Some have requested other writing contests too, so I have decided to organize both.

1) Debate Contest:

If you are interesting in participating in a debate contest sign up here. Mister. K already kindly volunteered to be a judge and as such he will be the Grandmaster of the Debate Contest. Participants will be divided into teams for the contests. Based on participation there maybe more than one contest. Topic will be assigned a few days before the contest.

Mister. K do you have any ideas on how we will determine which team will debate from which side?

Additional judges are welcome, post specifying if you would like to judge the debate contests too.

Participants and members - how long do you think one debate contest should last. One week or a few weeks? Should give plenty to time to debate a plenty - but not stretch to long.

I hope to start the Debate Contest - towards the end of may/beginning of June.

2) Writing Contest

Due to some interest in writing contest, there will also be a writing contest. There will be two types of writing contest.

a) Argument - You will be given a certain time period to submit an essay on for or against a given subject.

b) Creative - You will be give a certain time period to write a short story based on the given theme and elements.

Sign up here if you would like to participate in any of these.

Again judges are welcome to sign up too. Mister. K are you up for judging these too?

PS: I will only be organizing, not participating in these contests. 😊

Sarina, as far as the debate contests are concerned, I am not sure about teams. I think each is his/her own master. For instance, if you and me are on the same team, I might like two or three viewpoints that you expressed but might also feel that one or two of your viewpoints are vulnerable to attacks and hence I might want to disasscoiate myself from those. In that respect, I think, everyone should be on their own.

If everyone is on their own, some viewpoints might obviously match. In that case, we should give weight-age to the first person who expressed that viewpoint that scored or sat well with the judge(s).

We might have to limit the number of times a person could edit his/her response. Which means, the elapsed time between when the original post was made and when the post was edited (if edited) should be kept to a minimum. Unlike a regular debate contest where people go to the podium and speak up, this is more or less an essay-writing contest with a twist. The twist is, you could also answer back your critics.

Regarding the writing contest, we could also give good weight-age (50%?) to the number of "Likes" a person scored for his/her essay. What do you think of that?

I agree that each person is on their own. However, traditionally past debate contests have been teams. I tend to view it like a high school debate/forensics contest. It can get messy with each their own, with sometimes the argument being lopsided. With team debate contest teamwork and the ability to construct arguments together counts. Also it prevents people from just picking and debating what they believes in and ends up challenging at least half of them to argue against what they normally would. For example having Karan argue why Kashmir should be independent and why Ice-Thinker saying why it should not. 😉

Writing contests – I was thinking after topic is announced they will get fixed number of days to post. There will be a time deadline for their essay/story to be posted. Once posted there will be no edits allowed at all. I like the idea of 50% likes vs 50% judges marks. Also judges can also ask questions on the essay/story based on which scores will be based. Judges likes will not be counted. I'm tempted to increase the weight of judges scores just in case we have people asking their friends for likes.

Originally posted by: return_to_hades

I agree that each person is on their own. However, traditionally past debate contests have been teams. I tend to view it like a high school debate/forensics contest. It can get messy with each their own, with sometimes the argument being lopsided. With team debate contest teamwork and the ability to construct arguments together counts. Also it prevents people from just picking and debating what they believes in and ends up challenging at least half of them to argue against what they normally would. For example having Karan argue why Kashmir should be independent and why Ice-Thinker saying why it should not. 😉

Looks like you and me are going to end up having a debate on which format is better for the debate contest - team or individual.

Question(s) to you: When should the participant declare his affiliation to a group, assuming there are only two possible groups (for and against). Which begs another question, how are we (you) going to tailor the questions such that only two choices are possible, the choices being, yes I am for the subject and no I am against the subject. It might not be easy, drawing up such a debate. Something like pro and anti choice (abortion) could be black and white but very few topics are black and white. We might end up with both groups partially agreeing with each other on a number of issues. Refereeing such a debate is not easy either. We basically want them to really go at each other and not play nice.

Originally posted by: return_to_hades

Writing contests ' I was thinking after topic is announced they will get fixed number of days to post. There will be a time deadline for their essay/story to be posted. Once posted there will be no edits allowed at all. I like the idea of 50% likes vs 50% judges marks. Also judges can also ask questions on the essay/story based on which scores will be based. Judges likes will not be counted. I'm tempted to increase the weight of judges scores just in case we have people asking their friends for likes.

Yeah, it looks like it's a trade-off. If friends start liking each others' posts, that might skew results but also encourages overall participation, in a way. But having a deadline for submissions (a week or 10 days) is a great idea.

If we are worried about friends liking their friend's essay, we can consider blind review. Voters wont know who wrote that essay until the end. (they may guess based on the writing style, but still)

Originally posted by: karandel_2008

If we are worried about friends liking their friend's essay, we can consider blind review. Voters wont know who wrote that essay until the end. (they may guess based on the writing style, but still)

Sounds good to me; adds a ton of work to the organizer though. Mapping who submitted what to how many "Likes" each got could be a big headache. Plus, some might feel uncomfortable about the lack of openness of such a contest.

Hopefully we are not cooking a hundred dishes, only to find out that one solitary person showed up for dinner.

How about gauging the overall enthusiasm first before making heavy plans? At this point, I would wait for people to actually sign up on this thread saying that they are indeed interested in participating.

Originally posted by: Mister.K.

Hopefully we are not cooking a hundred dishes, only to find out that one solitary person showed up for dinner.

How about gauging the overall enthusiasm first before making heavy plans? At this point, I would wait for people to actually sign up on this thread saying that they are indeed interested in participating.

Bingo. There was a time when people on DM were enthusiastic about such contests. Not so much now. As OBJ said once, not many real debaters here. Maybe we should draft him on. 😆

Lets wait and see how many participants we have and move forward from there.

If people are shy, we can just look at the active members during that week and push them inside the ring, just like MOTW. 😆

one danger is that then people might run away from DM.

Originally posted by: karandel_2008

If people are shy, we can just look at the active members during that week and push them inside the ring, just like MOTW. 😆

one danger is that then people might run away from DM.

How about we push you, Ajnu and Sarina inside the ring first?! And next, Empti and P1nk.

BTW, Sarina you might want to change the subject from "Debate Contest: Sign Up Now" to "Debate Contest: PLEASE Sign Up Now"