Frequently Asked Questions

Why are you guys ranking high school students?

As a former speech student, I remember eagerly practicing just so that I could win the non-descript, plastic trophies presented at local tournaments. While I could have just as easily spent $10 to get the trophy, I instead spent hours upon hours practicing just to collect those trophies. It was through this competition that I ultimately matured as a speaker and as a person. It's my hope that by providing rankings to the greater forensics community, I can continue to encourage students to practice and develop as effective communicators (corny, I know, but true).

How do you rank students?

The formula's actually pretty easy to understand -- students get points in two ways: first, by placing at a tournament; second, by attending tournaments. The number of points that a student gets for placing at a tournament depends on how high the student finishes and also how competitive the tournament is. For example, a student who finishes first at a random tournament gets 100 points. If a student finishes first at a tough tournament, then the 100 points are multiplied by a "difficulty multiplier." For example, finishing first at NFL Nationals would give a student 140 points, rather than 100 points.

A student also gets 10 points for every tournament that he or she attends. The reason for this is to reward students who compete regularly. The more times that a student competes, the stronger that student is as a speaker. Naturally, this component rewards those students who have a larger team travel budget. However, given the relatively small number of points added for each tournament attended, we do not believe that this additional 10 point enhancement meaningly skews the rankings in favor of those students who are blessed with the opportunity to attend schools with large travel budgets.

Here is the point distribution in table-format:

Point Distribution First Place 100 points Second Place 92 points Third Place 84 points Fourth Place 76 points Fifth Place 68 points Sixth Place 60 points Semis 50 points Quarters 40 points Supers 45 points Did Not Break 20 points

Tournament Point Distribution Tournament Name Multiplier Points Apple Valley Minneapple 1.05 Berkeley 1.25 Blue Key 1.15 Columbia 1.0 Crestian 1.2 Emory 1.3 Glenbrooks 1.2 MBA 1.4 St. Marks 1.1 Stanford 1.05 UPenn 1.1 Villiger 1.05 Wake Forest 1.2 CFL Nationals 1.3 NFL Nationals 1.4 Harvard 1.35 Isidore Newman 1.1 University of Texas 1.05 Whitman 1.0 Yale 1.05 Extemp TOC 1.2 Congress TOC 1.35 TFA States 1.15 FFL States 1.15 CHASSA States 1.15

Why isn't ____ student included in your rankings?

Trust me, the goal is to rank every student in the country. But it takes a surprisingly large amount of time to incorporate everyone into our database. We're trying, though!

Why isn't ____ tournament included in your rankings?

We are trying to include all national tournaments in the rankings. It's an arduous process to incorporate all of these tournaments. You can help, though, by sending tournament results to us. We are continuously updating the tournament database with new results and rankings.

Haven't I seen these rankings somewhere else before?

Yup, probably. We used to run these rankings at forensicsonline.net. The rankings were briefly copied verbatim at another website. We never endorsed the copying of the rankings, but are flattered that other websites would emulate us.

Can I help?

Yup, thanks for asking! Here's how you can help

You can email us results.

You can tell your friends about the website.

You can look up our address somewhere and send us anonymous donations of money or cookies (white chocolate macadamia nut, please)

Who are you guys?

Well, there's only one person behind this effort. It's the same person who created forensicsonline.net. I couldn't get enough of speech and debate and website programming, so I'm back at it.