I know we tend to forget what we learned over the summer. So, a brief review. An argument has three parts: Assertion, Reasoning, and Evidence. We abbreviate these as A-R-E.
Now, as someone who is interested in debate, I have of course been watching the presidential candidate "debates." Why the quotes? Well, those of us who participate in middle school debating have higher expectations for what counts as a debate. For example, we expect that participants will make arguments (including reasoning and evidence). Is that what's going on in the presidential debates?
To find out, I've enlisted a few of the most gifted debaters I know. First up is Crystal, who is my lead research assistant on this project. Crystal will be a ninth grader next year in Southern California. She is a graduate of our Middle School Public Debate Program - a national champion as a seventh grader, she was the very best middle school debater in the United States in her eighth grade year.
Taking the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate as a starting point, Crystal went through every question, diagramming the candidates' responses, and keeping score. Just like diagramming sentences! They got one point if they made an assertion, two points if they had reasoning, and three points if they had evidence. Then, she gave them an overall score - how many points they received out of a possible number. Here's how they did, in alphabetical order:
- Biden: 12 responses, 100% assertions, 91.6% reasoning, 41.6% evidence, 2.583 average, SCORE: 86.1%
- Clinton: 15 responses, 100% assertions, 80% reasoning, 46.6% evidence, 2.6 average, SCORE: 86.6%
- Dodd: 12 responses, 100% assertions, 83.3% reasoning, 25% evidence, 2.416 average, SCORE: 80.5%
- Edwards: 15 responses, 100% assertions, 73.3% reasoning, 46.6% evidence, 2.8 average, SCORE: 93.3%
- Gravel: 10 responses, 100% assertions, 90% reasoning, 40% evidence, 2.6 average, SCORE: 86.6%
- Kucinich: 10 responses, 100% assertions, 90% reasoning, 50% evidence, 2.8 average, SCORE: 93.3%
- Obama: 20 responses, 100% assertions, 90% reasoning, 60% evidence, 2.7 average, SCORE: 90%
- Richardson: 13 responses, 100% assertions, 84.6% reasoning, 53.8% evidence, 2.461 average, SCORE: 82.05%
Interesting, isn't it? Now, there are some subjective elements here, but we're not trying to assign a "winner" to the debate; indeed, it's hard to see how you could assign a winner, since any attempt to do so would be even more wildly subjective than, say, your average attempt to judge a regular competitive debate. We are not, for example, rating the reasoning or evidence - just trying to see if there is any (talk about a revolution of lowered expectations!) Plus, the playing field isn't exactly level - you can see that Kucinich did very well, with an average score of 2.8 per response. But he only had 10 responses. Edwards also had 2.8, with a total of 15 responses.
Does that mean he "did better" in the debate than Kucinich? It depends. You'll notice that we haven't accounted here for whether the candidate could be fairly judged to actually answer the question they were asked (we're working on a rubric for this, and I'll post about this soon).
What really strikes me about this chart is the overall lack of evidence. It's not a pretty picture...Perhaps we should grade on a curve?
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