Participation Standard Report from T1

The single most important metric of a school’s performance in the Chicago Debate League is attainment of the UDL Participation Standard. The UDL Participation Standard for each school is 8 debaters per tournament (4 debaters per tournament for first-year schools, who have debaters in only one Division, JV). The Participation Standard is based on the logic that competitive academic debate is a rigorously educational activity, so engaging students in the activity is inherently productive. A school’s performance is predominantly measured based on how many students it has participating in competitive academic debate, and 8 debaters (i.e., 4 teams) has an empirical basis as an indicator of a robust debate program at a school.

The Participation Standard Report will be part of the full Tournament Reporting Notebook will be out later this week, but we wanted to post it in stand-alone form first.

The symbols mean this:

Y — Attained Standard
N — Did Not Attain Standard
NA — Not Officially in the CDL (usually this means the debate program joined the CDL too recently to be counted)
NS — No-Showed

The Participation Standard Report documents that 70% of our schools attained the Participation Standard at Tournament One, which is a very good League-wide performance when compared to our peers, and a solid increase over last year’s overall percentage of Participation Standard attainment.

Note, on the downside, that two No-Shows in the regular six-tournament CDL schedule results in a school being removed from the League for the remainder of the season. So we definitely want to work with the schools that didn’t attend T1 to get ready for T2.

Let us know if you have any questions at all.