Procedure for Submitting Legislation to the UDCA
Congressional Debate Committee
- Carefully follow the format found in the UHSAA handbook on pages 173-4, https://www.uhsaa.org/Publications/Handbook/ActivitiesSections/SpeechDebate.pdf.
- Coaches: Please send your school’s best submissions. Please do not send more than 12 submissions in any given month. Thank you for respecting the committee’s limited time.
- Type the legislation in an editable document, not a PDF. The document must be in a format that can be easily edited. The Congress Committee Chair will make a copy of your legislation and will edit your legislation based on the committee’s recommendations.
- For the last line of the legislation, type:
- Introduced for Congressional Debate by ______(name of author)______ of _____(name of school)______.
Please fill in your name and your school’s name. The Committee Chair will remove names and schools before sending submissions to the committee for review.
- Introduced for Congressional Debate by ______(name of author)______ of _____(name of school)______.
- Attach legislation in an email to mary.thayer@rop.com. The debate coach must be included in the email either as the submitter or CC’ed if submitted by a student. If the coach changes, please send an update ON THE SAME EMAIL THREAD.
- Submission deadlines are August 10, September 10, November 10 and December 10. The state docket will include legislation from the entire year.
- Process:
- 10th of the month: deadline for new submissions
- 15th of the month: committee chair sends submissions to committee members for review. Identifying information is removed for the review part of the process.
- 25th of the month: committee returns review to chair.
- End of the month: committee chair posts top 6 submissions on the UDCA website. (Chair will post up to 12 for the first month of a new school year.) Accepted legislation is posted with the names of authors and their schools.
- The final review (December) will not be posted until the end of January.
- All submissions receiving 3.0 or above will automatically remain in the pool u ntil they are among the top 6 for a given month or the school year ends.
- Submissions that do not follow the UHSAA Handbook format, have spelling/grammar errors, or do not follow the above instructions will be returned for revision before being accepted for review.
- All coaches are welcome to join the Congress Committee. Committee members are required to complete a review every month. Interested coaches, please email mary.thayer@rop.com.
Legislation Evaluation Rubric
Legislation is evaluated based on the following criteria by each committee member and given a score, zero being the lowest and five being the highest. All committee members’ scores are averaged to determine the quality of the submission. Submissions earning below 3.0 will be returned to the student for revision and can be resubmitted for a future review. The top submissions will be posted on the UDCA website for use in interscholastic competition.
Debatability — legislation is clearly controversial (good arguments exist for both sides)
Recency — legislation is timely with regard to current events
Newness — legislative issue has not been debated recently/too frequently
Significance — legislation is not trivial in focus
Interesting — legislation pertains to issues that students would enjoy debating
National Focus — legislation must involve national interest and enforcement
Jurisdiction — legislative interest or enforcement must be under the jurisdiction of the appropriate federal governmental body
Appropriate — legislation should pertain to issues that teachers deem appropriate for school discussion
Challenging — legislative issue requires research and critical thinking on the part of the students