World Universities Debating Championship

The World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC) is the world's largest debating tournament, and one of the largest annual international student events in the world. It is a parliamentary debating event, held using either the British Parliamentary Debate format (involving four teams of two people in each debate) or the American Parliamentary Debate format (two teams of two people). Each year, the event is hosted by a university selected by the World Universities Debating Council. The tournament is colloquially referred to as "Worlds" and the winners of the open competition acknowledged as the "world champions".

The most recent edition of the tournament took place in The Hague in January 2017. The current World Champions are Emma Johnstone and James Leeder representing Sydney University. The English as a Second Language (ESL) competition was won by Tom Manor and Noam Dahan of Tel Aviv University, while Belgrade University (Milos Majanovic and Teodora Resetar) won the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) tournament.

The championship is usually held in the days following Christmas, since many of the institutions attending from the Northern Hemisphere where the championship originated take vacations at this time. Although many countries that do not celebrate Christmas have become participants at the competition, the timing has remained the same. In most recent years, the nine preliminary rounds of the tournament have been held over three days from 29–31 December, with the elimination rounds being held on 2 January and the Grand Final on 3 January.

In recent years, the championship has varied from about 150 to 400 teams, depending on the capacity of the host institution. With judges and organisers, this involves 500 to 1,000 participants in all.

The competition involves nine preliminary rounds, which become "power-paired" as the tournament progresses, matching the strongest-performing teams against each other. Two teams form the "government" ("proposition" in the UK and North America) and two the "opposition" in each debate room. The process of scoring and pairing these teams is known as "tabbing". The scoring of teams is done by judges, most of whom are students or former students from the competing institutions, who return "ballots" with their scores to the adjudication team, led by a Chief Adjudicator who is assisted by one or more deputies. The deputies are not members of the host institution.

...
Wikipedia