Procedure for Submitting Legislation
to the UDCA

Congressional Debate Committee

1.     Carefully
follow the format found in the UHSAA handbook on page 176, illustrated on page
175. https://uhsaa.org/Publications/Handbook/Handbook.pdf

2.    
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.

3.    
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.

4.    
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.

5.    
Submission
deadlines are Aug 10, Sept. 10, Nov. 10, and Dec. 10. The state
docket will include legislation from the entire year.

6.    
Process:

a.    
10^th
of the month: deadline for new submissions

b.    
15^th of
the month: committee chair sends submissions to committee members for review.
Identifying info is removed for the review part of the process.

c.     
25^th of
the month: committee returns review to chair.

d.    
31^st 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.

e.    
All submissions
receiving 3.0 or above will automatically remain in the pool until they are
among the top 6 for a given month or the school year ends.

f.     
The final review (December) will not be posted
until the end of January. 

7.    
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.

8.    
All coaches are welcome to join the
Congress Committee. Committee members are not required to
complete a review every month. Interested coaches, please email chair at
mary.thayer@rop.com.

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.

UDCA
Student Congressional Debate Committee

Legislation
Evaluation Rubric

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