Menick contends that fewer tiers are fine, thanks. I’m definitely in the more-is-better school with categories. Fewer categories needlessly throws away information that could be used by tab to make more mutual pairings, is why.
I think the point of difference is that he defines a “mutual” matchup as a matchup where the two judges are in the same category, and anything else as imperfect. But the real picture is murkier than that; simply making the categories larger and thereby forcing me to rate more judges in a category does not magically make all those judges equally preferred to my debaters.
Suppose one tournament has 4 categories and another 8; and the first delivers 100% mutual matchups, and the second has a number of one-offs on the pairing. The second tournament will have delivered the more mutual judging. The 4-category tournament will have many more matchups that are just as non-mutual as those 8 category one-offs. They will only nominally be mutual to the eye of the tabber. There will be more of them, too, as the tab system no longer knows which matchups would have been 1-2s in a 8 category system, and so it can do nothing to minimize them.
When you place a 1-2 judge in an 8 category tournament, you know what you’re doing and you know there’s no better choice. If that same tournament used 4 tiers, then you might place that same judge into the same debate, despite there being a more mutual option which is concealed by the broader, less precise categories. The pairing looks prettier, but at the expense of the missing data which might make it fairer. Choosing tier sizes should not be about satisfying the OCD of tab staff.
Pairing mutual matchups is becoming an automatic process, and there’s little reason to deprive this process of additional data. The point of expanding to more categories while necessarily growing more permissive of one-off matchups is not to increase the numbers of those matchups, but to minimize the number of hidden ones. So from a tabbing perspective there is little defense in my mind to using blunter, less precise categories.
It may be there’s a limit past which coaches are unable to make distinctions in the judging pool. That limit is higher than 9, for me: I certainly could have filled out a pref sheet at Lex with clear distinctions between tiers; all my 1s would have been preferred to the 2s, all 2s over the 3s, etc. The distinctions would have carried real information well down my sheet, and if I were going to the tournament, I’d want the tab staff to have that information in pairing my judging.
College debate has operated for some years under the premise that the limit of reasonable distinctions does not exist, and rates judging ordinally at most tournaments. I think the high school community largely hasn’t followed suit only because our software wouldn’t permit it, not for any inherent reason. At worst, finer distinctions do no harm; if you really don’t have any point of difference between 6s and 7s on your sheet, then just randomly assign them between the two ratings. Given that I am a coach who makes those distinctions, I don’t see why I should sacrifice them because another coach does not.
So in short, I’m a computer programmer, and a data person, and I don’t see much value in sacrificing more data for less.