List of Competitors

- Jury Instructions-

1. Evaluation Criteria: Please remember to evaluate the debate teams based on the quality of their argumentation (for example logos, pathos and ethos), and not upon the extent to which you agree or disagree with their positions.
What constitutes quality argumentation is up to you.

2. Deliberation: At the end of the debate you will gather as a jury to deliberate. In doing so, please fill out the ballot as a group. In other words, each jury receives only one ballot, so you will have to find some way to achieve “consensus” with regard to the ballot.

3. Ranking: The ballot will ask you to rank the teams best to last (1-6), and to assign each team a quality grade of 1-100. Think of quality points as a letter grade (i.e. 95 = A, 90 = A-, 87 = B+, 85 = B, etc.). The ballot will not ask you to vote affirmative or negative. For example you can rank an affirmative team 1st and a negative team 2nd.

4. Remember: You are the jury. The power to evaluate the debate is yours. There are no right or wrong assessments. If you are “moved,” informed, “put-off,” impressed, persuaded, etc. those are your intellectual and/or emotional responses to the debate. Please feel free to express them in the jury deliberation room.

We thank you for supporting the James Madison Commemorative Debate and Citizen Forum, AKA The Battle for the Madison Cup, the JMU Debate program, and the James Madison Day Celebration!

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