WSDC Scoring
iRank uses World Schools Debating Championships scoring, and only that format. The numbers on this page are rulebook constants, not settings — nobody at iDebate can change them, and the ballot will not accept a score outside them.
What you score
Every substantive speech is scored on three criteria.
| Criterion | Range | Average | Share of the speech |
|---|---|---|---|
| Style | 24–32 | 28 | 40% |
| Content | 24–32 | 28 | 40% |
| Strategy | 12–16 | 14 | 20% |
| Speech total | 60–80 | 70 |
A speech of exactly average quality scores 28 / 28 / 14 = 70. Most speeches you judge should land near that. A score of 80 means the best schools debating speech you can imagine; 60 means a speaker who barely engaged.
Style is how they said it — delivery, tone, pace, use of notes. Content is what they said — the arguments themselves and the evidence. Strategy is the choices they made — what to prioritise, when to rebut, how they used their time.
Reply speeches are halved
A reply speech is scored on the same three criteria, then halved.
| Range | Average | |
|---|---|---|
| Reply speech | 30–40 | 35 |
You do not do this arithmetic yourself. Mark the speech as a reply on the ballot and iRank applies the halving.
Half marks are the smallest step
You may score 28 or 28.5, but not 28.25 and not 28.7. The ballot will refuse anything finer and tell you why.
This is deliberate. Finer gradations imply a precision that judging does not have, and they make scores from different judges harder to compare.
Points of Information
You may adjust a speaker’s total by up to ±2 for how they handled points of information — both offering them and taking them.
The adjustment can never push a speech outside its band. A speaker on 80 cannot reach 82; a speaker on 60 cannot fall to 58. iRank clamps this for you.
Two rules the ballot enforces
No low-point wins. The team you declare the winner must have the higher total. If your scores say one team won and your decision says the other did, the ballot will not submit — one of the two is wrong, and only you can say which.
No draws. Every debate has a winner. If both teams total the same, revisit your marks until they do not.
These are not iRank being strict. They are WSDC rules, and a ballot that broke them would produce a tournament result that could not be defended.
Worked example
A close debate where Proposition edges it:
| Speaker | Style | Content | Strategy | POI | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prop 1 | 28 | 28.5 | 14 | +0.5 | 71 |
| Prop 2 | 28.5 | 28 | 14.5 | 0 | 71 |
| Prop 3 | 28 | 28 | 14 | +1 | 71 |
| Proposition | 213 | ||||
| Opp 1 | 28 | 28 | 14 | 0 | 70 |
| Opp 2 | 28 | 27.5 | 14 | +0.5 | 70 |
| Opp 3 | 27.5 | 28 | 13.5 | +1 | 70 |
| Opposition | 210 |
Proposition wins by 3 — a narrow but clear margin. Declaring Opposition the winner here would be a low-point win, and the ballot would stop you.
If you are unsure
Score the speech you actually heard, not the speech you expected. A judge who puts every speaker on 70 has told the tab team nothing; a judge who ranges from 62 to 78 in a single debate has probably over-read small differences.
The reference is the WSDC Scoring Guide and the WSDC Rubric, which iDebate distributes to every judge before a tournament.