DOCUMENT DOWNLOADS

The LDEP has created many documents to help improve the educational value of the event, and these documents are all freely available here. These are designed to help coaches, judges and tournament directors to help the students themselves.

Each document was carefully crafted and approved by our board of directors, a wide range of coaches from across the country. They do not represent any one person's views, and everyone (even board members) will find something they do not fully agree with. However, these documents do represent a very thoughtful compromise by committed coaches with many years of experience.

All these documents are provided in PDF format. For easiest downloading, right-click on the link and choose "Save Target as..." (if you are using Internet Explorer) or "Save Link as..." (if you are using Firefox).

Summer Program Shoppers' Guide: This provides some things for parents, students and coaches to think about in selecting a summer debate program. In this, the LDEP suggests many questions that you might want to ask before you decide on a summer program.

Recommended Tournament Practices: This is a set of tournament practices that we encourage all tournament directors to adopt.

Ballots: We endorse the use of the new NFL LD ballot.

Judging Recommendations: This is a set of recommendations that we encourage tournament directors to distribute to all judges (new and veteran), and to announce strongly that they should be taken seriously as your tournament policy. Of course, you are welcome to create your own judging recommendations that incorporate some of these.

Introduction to Judging: This is a brief primer we developed for new judges. We recommend that coaches use it to supplement the training they provide for new judges.

Conflicts of Interest in Judging: We recommend that tournament directors adopt a clear policy on conflicts of interest, and this is a model of what such a policy might look like. If you run a tournament, we encourage you to use this policy or one like it that you have developed.

Research Ethics Guidelines: Debate research provides students with a competitive advantage in rounds and in life. Developing a sense of research integrity in our current debaters is important to everyone in debate and in society, since these are some of our future leaders. So, we have developed three documents concerning research ethics.

Guidelines for Students: A brief guide to what standards should be expected in debate research, tips on avoiding common mistakes, and an introduction to proper citation.

Guidelines for Judges: A few recommendations on what judges can do to promote research integrity in debate, and to deal with suspected unethical behavior in rounds.

Guidelines for Coaches: A few recommendations on what coaches can do to promote research integrity in debate.