CRLC Rule Change Prioritization

Context: In the current district debate rules, there are priorities that must be followed in order when putting together a pairing. Avoiding same-school hits (debaters from the same school debating one another) is a higher priority than bracket integrity (undefeated entries debate other undefeated entries). This means that in small debate events at districts, entries are often pulled up to debate a team that has a better record than they do in order to avoid two teams from the same school debating. This proposal asks the NSDA to give districts the autonomy to force same-school teams to debate instead. Since tabulation software can not control those priorities via settings, approving this proposal would be allowing districts to manually manipulate pairings.

Context: Current rules state that students who have attended a secondary school more than nine semesters cannot compete at the district tournament series or enter the National Tournament. This proposal seeks to change the rule to "Students who have COMPETED IN SPEECH AND DEBATE for more than nine semesters cannot compete at the district tournament or Nationals." The rationale is to allow students who are in high school for longer than four years to have continued opportunities to compete.

This proposal is to add two speeches after debate on a bill has ceased and a motion for the previous question has been passed. The first negative will give a 2 minute reject speech, and the author/sponsor will then give a 2 minute appeal speech. The rationale for this proposal is to incentivize more speakers to give the sponsorship/first neg speeches, which many debaters avoid because they feel they don't get to offer much clash in these speeches.

Visual aids are currently optional in MS Info. This proposal is to remove the option for middle school students to use VAs because they are expensive and difficult to travel, which can prevent middle school coaches from wanting to try the event with young students.

This proposal asks the NSDA to create a rule that says that PF debaters cannot run disclosure theory. Teams running disclosure theory argue that their opponents should lose the debate for failing to post a summary of their arguments/citations on a public website often referred to as "the wiki." Currently, NSDA rules do not speak to this practice, and it is up to the judges' discretion as to how they adjudicate arguments about disclosure.

Currently, debaters earn 6 points for a win and 3 points for a loss. This proposal asks for 8 points to be awarded for a win, and 2 points to be awarded for a loss. The rationale is that debate events are intense and students deserve to earn more points for winning them. The proposer avoids the perceived harms of point inflation by reducing the points for a loss.

NSDA rules do not explicitly speak to whether debaters need to take prep time when they request evidence, look for evidence that is requested, or share an evidence document (paper, email, flash drive). In many rounds, this is not currently counted as prep time, and evidence exchange can take several minutes during a round, potentially being abused as free prep time.

Students are required to use multiple sources to construct their POI speech, but there is no limit as to how many sources can be used. This proposal asks for a cap to be set at four due to a concern over recent POI trends in which students are listing 10-12 sources for their program. Their concern is that students are taking one sentence from each source and putting them together, which misrepresents the authors' original intent and leads to "frankensteining" scripts together.

Currently, publication rules for Interpretation events state that students cannot perform self-written material. This proposal asks for that rule to be removed so that students can tell their own stories in Interp events, potentially fostering students' exploration of identity and interest in writing.

Currently, the top 10 schools with combined speech and debate sweepstakes points at Nationals earn the Outstanding Distinction award. To be eligible, schools have to have had students in elims of both debate and speech events. This proposal asks the NSDA to stop combining debate/speech points to determine the top 10, and instead, create one list of top speech schools and one list of top debate schools. The top 10 Outstanding Distinction schools will be based on the top 5 speech schools and the top 5 debate schools. The rationale is to ensure speech-heavy schools are able to receive this designation, given that a student in the first elim of debate receives more points for a school than a student in the first elim of speech. The rationale for the current policy is to award an equal OVERALL number of speech and debate points, since there are more speech students who clear to elims than debaters.

Currently, a student who accepts their auto-qualification to Nationals can compete at the district tournament, but they must vacate their qualification if they qualify. This proposal asks the NSDA to stop auto-qualified students from competing at districts. The rationale is that the presumably competitive auto-qualifiers will knock out entries at the district tournament early, which doesn't give them a fair competition. The rationale for allowing them to compete is to help districts with small entry numbers meet qualification thresholds.