Roundtable: High School LD to College Policy
The transition from high school LD to college policy debate can be daunting, but more and more LDers are successfully making the jump. In this post, we asked five former LD debaters who now debate college policy to share their experiences and advice. We’re excited to have these excellent debaters weigh in and guide current LDers thinking about college policy. Thanks to Emmiee Malyugina (UC Berkeley), Raffi Piliero (Georgetown), Kathy Wang, Jong Hak Won (Georgetown), and Lawrence Zhou (Oklahoma) for their wonderful advice below!
Everyone answered every question and wrote in such great detail that we couldn’t fit it all in one post! What’s here is excerpted – if you’d like to read everyone’s answers, the full Q&A is available for download here.
[1] What was the process of finding and working with a partner like? Was there anything you had to change about the way you approach prep?
Jong Hak: The team at Georgetown was relatively small (an average of 6 debaters at any given time), so partnerships this year coalesced naturally. My partner was just someone I got along with during preseason and outside of tournaments, so we worked well together. My advice for finding a partner is to make sure that they’re someone who has similar competitive goals, who you can get along with, but also someone who will incentivize you to work harder to meet their competitiveness.
Compared to high school, I became only responsible for the aff side of our prep because I was the 2A in my partnership. In most policy partnerships, the burden of prep is roughly distributed with the 2A handling aff prep and the 2N handling neg prep. Having a partner meant having to figure out how to adapt any prep I made for my partner’s 1AR to suit her skillset, which meant having to think outside of what worked for me and agreeing on a system of organizing blocks that worked for the both of us.
Emmiee: I had one main partner I debated with during the year and a few others who I was paired with when both of our partners couldn’t make a tournament. There wasn’t really much of a process to choosing partners since my team had a lot of incoming freshmen, so everyone found someone they got along with and who had similar styles they were passionate about. I think it’s important to communicate interests/commitment levels with potential partners and to not be afraid to switch to debating with someone else mid-year if your current partnership isn’t working out. A lot of things can change during the year and it’s not uncommon for freshman debaters to realize that they don’t have enough free time to allocate to debate, become heavily involved with another student organization, or decide they want to try out a different style. Alternatively, some freshmen end up dedicating more time to debate to the point where you might not be able to keep up without sacrificing schoolwork or a social life! Prep-wise, I had to shift from prepping on my own time to having shared calendars and finding time when both my partner and I were available. I also more or less stopped doing AFF prep, since I’m the 2N. Something else that changed is that my teammates were much more open to sharing prep. The whole team would collaborate on core AFF/NEG files and everyone’s work was on a shared dropbox, which was nice because I could see how other people prepped for tournaments and could discuss ideas with them.
Lawrence: I had an absurd number of partners over the four years I debated college policy. I only had one my freshman and one my sophomore year, but my junior year, I had two partners (one for each tournament I went to), and my senior year, I had three partners (also one for each tournament I went to).
Finding a partner my freshman year was pretty easy – my team just assigned me another freshman who I was friends with from high school because he debated policy in high school. My sophomore year, I was assigned a partner who didn’t like his previous partner and just wanted to work with me. My junior and senior years, I didn’t take college policy that seriously so I just went to tournaments with people who needed partners.
Finding a partner is basically a combination of two factors – whether the coaches want to pair you two together and whether you two want to pair together. For a smaller team like Oklahoma, it was mostly up to the students to pick partnerships among themselves. For larger teams, the process is much different.
Prepping with a partner is a lot different. Since one partner is usually the 2N (second negative) and one is usually the 2A (second affirmative), each partner will control significant portions of that side’s prep. For example, my sophomore year, my partner was the 2N and really liked arguments involving psychoanalysis, but I was the 2A and really liked defending a plan, so our prep was very different. I spent my time compiling wiki prep and cutting cards about military presence and my partner spent time reading books about Lacan. This meant I really had to change the way I prepped since I now only controlled one side of the prep and had to trust my partner to take the lead on the other side’s prep. You have to be willing to compromise when prepping with your partner since their input matters a lot, especially when they’re the one controlling that side’s prep.
[2] Did you notice any difference in judging norms? Are there certain practices or arguments in LD that policy judges are more skeptical of?
Kathy: I think LD and policy are just really different kinds of debate. There’s a lot less trickiness in policy, which I really appreciate. Policy judges are pretty fun and you can still run pretty fun arguments, but at the same time things like the “resolved a priori” wouldn’t really fly. I think that inherent gut check against really vacuous, blippy arguments makes policy a lot more fun for me personally — losing rounds off of the smallest technical concessions really stinks and without a need or tolerance for those blippy arguments, there’s much better depth of discussion to be had. I don’t particularly miss tricks debate.
Besides that, I guess the only other thing for me is just semantics — for example, things like theory-based presumption arguments don’t really exist, which is a lot of the foundation for what presumption’s been in LD. Not to say that’s a huge deal, but sometimes the same kind of terms are used and conflated.
Raffi: Judges are a lot less willing to vote on silly/untrue arguments, and are much more truth over tech. Even if an argument is conceded, if there isn’t evidence backing it up (or if the evidence is suspect), most judges just won’t vote for it. Evidence quality matters a lot more – judges flow a lot better than high school judges, but are much more willing to hold the line against bad arguments. Notably, theory is a lot less prevalent. Any CP theory aside from conditionality is almost never a reason to reject the team, and for most judges conditionality is borderline unwinnable unless you’re getting up to/past 3 counterplans – I think we probably had 2 neg debates this entire season where theory was in the 1AR, and only one where it made it to the 2AR. Also, ethical framework isn’t as much of a thing – most people just assume util (although soft left Affs are occasionally read, albeit more rarely).
Lawrence: Oh yes! Policy judges are both better and worse than LD judges. I’ll start with the good things. By and large, policy judges are more experienced judges and have engaged the relevant literature in a serious manner. Policy decisions are generally incredibly in-depth, full of analysis of every piece of evidence that was read and the judges draw from a lot of their background knowledge to inform decisions. The decisions reflect a lot of personal insight by the judges and demonstrate the higher quality judging available. In a lot of top debates in college policy, the decisions are usually high enough quality that you’ll learn something from the decision itself, something that doesn’t usually happen in LD decisions.
The downside of policy judging is that they’re incredibly skeptical of a lot of practices in LD and will often refuse to vote on them. I remember in my JV case my freshman year putting a full minute of theory preempts in the bottom of the aff before my coach told me to take that out. And my sophomore year, there was more than one tournament where at least one theory argument was in my 2AR (usually condo or pics bad). But that had to stop because judges just wouldn’t vote on it. Arguments in policy usually have to cohere with what a judge considers a legitimate argument to begin with, and many judges just refuse to vote on certain arguments. Some judges refuse to vote on condo unless its dropped, some refuse to vote on framework, etc. If it’s an argument they don’t find persuasive or true, then they often just won’t discuss it in their decision. By and large, policy judges are very skeptical of LD practices involving philosophy or theory and will paradigmatically refuse to vote on most theory that isn’t policy canon, i.e. condo or pics bad.
[3] Both coaches and incoming freshmen frequently already know each other from high school policy. What’s the best way for LD crossovers to get to know the team and ensure one-on-one coaching or tournament spots?
Raffi: I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that coaches want you to succeed. Debate is fun, and they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t care about the activity and it being inclusive. My coaches were incredibly supportive and took the time to help me figure out a lot of nuances of policy that I hadn’t gotten from LD. Whether just long conversations in the debate office or speeches on things that I hadn’t really been exposed to like tricky CPs (or even just states and politics, which I’d never gone for in HS), they were super helpful. In terms of tournament spots, I think just realizing that debate is a process, and that if you continue to work hard, you’ll improve and earn those spots. This wasn’t an issue for us since Georgetown is a small squad, but for larger squads, I know that coaches do make an effort to ensure that people get the opportunity to compete and have a chance.
Jong Hak: It was easier for me to get one-on-one time/tournaments spots given how small the Georgetown squad ended up being this year. If you are heavily considering debate in college, it may be worth considering a smaller squad even if it is a comparatively less successful one.
For someone who is on a larger team, I feel like the best way is to really show your commitment to the coaching staff and to your teammates. You can do that through practice speeches for coaches or extra care with an assignment to turn out particularly good cards. In terms of teammates, it can help to try to bond/clash over non-debate related issues. It’ll be really tempting to only talk about debate since that’s everyone’s common ground, but other topics will let you socialize better/get to know the people you’re debating with better.
Emmiee: The Berkeley team was pretty large this year so the best way to get attention was to explicitly ask coaches to give speeches or take on assignments. There were always a few coaches in the office who were willing to help out and give one-on-one time, so making sure to spend a few hours in the office every day instead of working elsewhere was very helpful. I think any coach will give spots and attention to a student who shows initiative and is clearly improving, so making sure the coaches are aware that you’re doing prep or asking for practice rounds or even just spending a lot of time wherever the team meets to practice can get you the attention that you want.
[4] Given that policy debates are more in-depth, any tips on effectively researching positions? Is there anything you do differently now than when you did LD?
Kathy: Read, read, read. I read so much more now. It’s fantastic. The lit is just so fascinating. I also try to read without the “I’m going to use this for debate” mindset and just absorb what authors have to say — more often than not authors are making arguments already, so understanding the full gist of what people say and not just the three pages debate zeroed in on to make a whole off-case is really helpful in understanding how things interact. Arguments come from reading, not the other way around.
I feel like policy’s also made me a lot smarter, or at least a lot more knowledgeable about the world. I’m subscribed to a bunch of current events newsletters and RSS feeds and have read a lot more K lit as well. Debates in policy are super in-depth, and I honestly really love that about the activity. Coming in with as wide and deep of an understanding as you can is crucial to engagement, which then builds even better clash in future debates. Really paying attention to rounds instead of rattling off pre-written blocks is probably where I learn the most from debating.
One last thing on this end — talking to people with policy experience (either HS or college) was pretty helpful to me in understanding the ways in which people view arguments. It’s also kinda funny to listen to them nerd out about it.
Raffi: Files are a lot longer, and more extensive, given how many more speeches there are. As a result, the bar for a position being viable is substantially higher – for example, a DA that you want to win on has to survive 1NC CX, the 2AC, 2NC CX (if it’s in the 2NC), the 1AR, and the 2AR, which gives the Aff many opportunities to poke holes and read lots of evidence. Given the amount of time investment it takes to turn out a good file, there’s a huge incentive to make sure that you’re writing something worthwhile and not getting lost down a useless rabbit hole for the days/weeks it can take to produce a good file. To give some context, in the month or so prior to the NDT, I think I produced a total of just 2 major files, and each had upwards of 100 cards. The way our squad did prep was each person would take on one assignment at a time prior to a tournament – once finished, they’d take on another one. This was how most debate time was spent, with other time being spent doing speaking drills or scheduling speeches with coaches. I’m actually not sure how other squads do this, but at Georgetown at least each person is responsible for highlighting all of their stuff themselves before a tournament in order to ensure people really understand the cards. That is, each 2N individually highlights neg files for their debates (and same with 2As and Aff files), so that was a little different for me at first. I also spent a lot less time drilling than I did in HS since there’s definitely more of a premium on card cutting – in addition to speeches in front of coaches, I used to give lots of speeches at home to work on efficiency and stuff in HS, but college debaters have been debating for so long and have a lot of the fundamentals down. In terms of tournaments, there are a lot fewer, since 8 rounds that each take 2+ hours are grueling – I think I went to maybe 10 tournaments this year which is about half as many as I did my senior year in LD, and that’s still considered a lot by college standards.
Lawrence: I’ll be honest, the last couple of years, I didn’t take policy that seriously and didn’t do that much research. Plus, I stopped defending a plan sophomore year, so that changed the type of research I did. When I was defending a plan, I was basing most of my prep around the wiki, not just in terms of just stealing cards (although I did do a lot of that), but more cutting answers only to things that were on the wiki. When researching positions, the main thing that really differed from LD was the amount of research that went into just defending every part of every argument you could advance. In LD, cutting an advantage really just meant cutting an advantage and that was it. In policy, when I broke a new advantage, it required tons of new cards that defended every possible point of weakness in the advantage. I remember one of the frontlines for an advantage being about 50 pages long, with a 2ac card to various impact, internal link, and link turns, answers to each piece of impact defense, and answers to most solvency deficits. In LD, you didn’t need to seriously prep that deeply for an advantage, but in policy, you had to find a card that substantiated almost everything that you said, even if accidentally defended in one of your other cards. Of course, after I stopped defending a plan, that was when I didn’t take policy seriously, so I mostly just wiki-mined whenever I prepped.
[5] What advice would you give to high school seniors who want to start preparing for college policy during the summer?
Jong Hak: Three big pieces of advice:
#1. Cut cards! One of the biggest ways to get a leg up both in the team and for the season is to cut cards during the summer. The topic area is released sometime in May (I think?!), and the topic wording comes out in July. Cutting some preliminary cards will give you an early understanding of the topic that some of your policy-background teammates might not have when they show up to pre-season. And if the coaches don’t have anything topic specific to do, ask if there’s a generic backfile that needs updating: impact defense, impact turns, k answers, etc. Ask for feedback too. Last summer, I was too shy to ask for feedback on my cards which meant it took until the middle of our preseason to get criticism on my card quality. It was only through having a more experienced pair of eyes on my cards was I able to get my assignments up to the quality that my coaches needed for files that were readable in round.
#2. Talk to your coaches! The only way the coaches will notice you is if you at least attempt to talk to them. If the team has a Slack or something equivalent, it should be fairly easy to get ahold of them. If you’re on a team with multiple coaches, you can also get a feel for which coaches are more responsive/more willing to work with you. The more you talk to them, the better pre-round coaching will be, so it can only help. Some good starter questions could be about how they would advise you to transition to policy and things that you could do over the summer.
#3. Watch rounds! Watching high caliber rounds is a great way to gain insight on how strategy in college policy works and learning how to do what in each speech. In particular, paying attention to things like the block split, how the 2AC responds to the 1NC, and what the 2NR ends up being are some of the key parts of the debate to pay attention to.
Emmiee: I feel like I didn’t do half the work last summer that I should have. In retrospect, watching debate rounds would have been really helpful because it can give you a general idea of how people strategize and how arguments are run. A lot of the NDT 2018 rounds have been recorded and are on Youtube, so I would suggest watching some of the elim rounds from there. If you can get in contact with coaches or teammates and start helping with pre-season prep once the topic area comes out, I’d recommend that as well because it will let the coaches know you’re committed to the team and give you a lot of important topic knowledge. However, since many debate coaches have a lot of incoming emails and don’t always respond quickly, even just reading articles or watching lectures can give you a lot of background info that will be useful during the year. Usually, teams have shared dropboxes with backfiles and cards from past topics that you should look through to get a feel of how files are constructed. I’d recommend looking through the K files especially, since they tend to be debated at a very surface level in LD and most of the cards will readable on next year’s topic as well.
Kathy: I’ve never really been in that position, so I obviously can’t speak to it, but I really think that finding enjoyment in debate is very psychological. If I had joined policy right after graduating, I probably would have quit. Coming out of high school I felt so exhausted and worn down by debate and kind of hated it a little, so I took a year off and just did some coaching and judging here and there. I really didn’t have any intention of joining policy at all, honestly. I kind of did it on a whim because I wanted to see friends from other schools more than once a year and if I had to get annihilated and go 0-8 every tournament, then so be it. But I ended up really having fun and I love my team more than words can express – they’re all incredible people and debaters and I sometimes can’t believe how lucky I am to have met them. That’s kept me super involved and frankly, so much happier with debate. Policy is the best thing to happen to me in college so far. I’m literally making a friendship bracelet for someone on the team as I’m typing this. I think giving and receiving all that love and support on the team motivated me to put a lot more in, and that’s probably why I don’t suck as much as I did in high school.
That’s not great advice for the summer before, but I think it’s still important. Make debate a place of happiness for you. Going to tournaments for me isn’t just about debating anymore: it’s also about spending a weekend with some of my best friends. The more debate is a place of fun and joy for you, the easier it gets. It took me 6 years to learn that, but it’s really changed debate for me.
Authors
Emmiee Malyugina debated in Lincoln-Douglas for Harker HS her senior year where she received 3 bids and several round robin invitations. She consistently broke at national debate tournaments and won numerous speaker awards. Emmiee currently debates for UC Berkeley and will be on faculty at Premier18 this summer!
Raffi Piliero debated in Lincoln-Douglas for Harrison where he received 11 bids, broke at the TOC twice, attended many round robins, and won several major invitationals. He currently debates for Georgetown University, where he qualified for the NDT his freshman year.
Kathy Wang debated in Lincoln-Douglas for Stuyvesant where she frequently broke at national tournaments and directed the JV squad, helping younger debaters transition to circuit LD. She currently coaches LD and debates in college policy. Kathy is also an alum of Premier15!
Jong Hak Won debated in Lincoln-Douglas for West Ranch HS where he received 7 bids his senior year and broke at the TOC. He was a finalist at the Stanford Invitational, semifinalist at Berkeley, and received invitations to many round robins. He is currently coaching LD and debating for Georgetown University. He is an alum of Premier16 and will be on faculty at Premier18 this summer!
Lawrence Zhou debated in Lincoln-Douglas for Bartlesville HS in Oklahoma where he was the 2014 NSDA LD National Champion. He then debated for the University of Oklahoma where he ended his career in octos of the CEDA National Tournament and 30th speaker. He also advanced to outrounds of CEDA his sophomore year and several other national tournaments.
