Debate rankings, 2025-26

These are rankings for the College Policy, Lincoln-Douglas, and Public Forum circuits for the 2025-26 season. The algorithm is a slightly modified version of the Glicko-2 rating system, the same family used by chess.com and CS:GO among others. The code is all open source.

Rating calculation

The rating displayed and used for rankings is a variance-discounted version of the score Glicko-2 produces. Glicko-2 gives two numbers per competitor: a rating and a deviation / volatility score. The volatility scales inversely with the number of matches played, serving as a proxy for how erratic a competitor’s performance is expected to be. In practical terms, debaters and teams who attend few tournaments carry higher volatility, because their performance has not been tested over a large dataset of matches.

Majors (Lincoln-Douglas only)

For Lincoln-Douglas, rounds at major tournaments are counted twice instead of once. Performance at a major more accurately reflects a debater’s skill given a robust judging pool and debaters putting in their best effort, and the rankings aim to identify debaters expected to perform well at the TOC. The majors so far:

• Heart of Texas
• The Glenbrooks
• Greenhill
• Harvard Westlake
• Emory
• Harvard
• Berkeley
• NDCA