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Okay this past weekend I had gone with the debate team to a tournament in Alabama. This was my first time doing Public Forum and second debate( the last one was 3 years ago). My partner and I ended up coming in 2nd for the novice Public Forum. The reason though according to one judge was that my partner was too assertive and should not have interrupted his opponent during cross examination. Yet he said that he liked that I was the most mature and treated it like a discussion, but I could be more assertive. The second judge said we didn't explain something which we had twice, while the opponets were unable to explain some questions my parnter asked. The third judge though really had nothing to say to us. Then we had to stay behind for 5 hours for the awards and then the coach got lost for another 3 hours getting home so I didn't get home until 3am last night which just made me even more pissed off.

The thing I noticed though was that the two judges that voted against us had already judged the other team and the judge that voted for us had judged us before. They also gave me more speaker points than my partner, while in all the other matches my partner was beating varsity debaters and got the 5th place speaker award.
Something about this just doesn't seem right about this. Now I would have no problem with the results if I had gotten the least amount of points for I thought i was the weakest link.

Oh well it feels a bit better writing what I think about the outcome of the match.

Perhaps you just did an exemplary job in the judges' eyes.

If your partner interrupted, he's to blame. Despite what the politicians say, that's not the way to win a real debate.

Well all he did was continually ask the girl questions and only interrupt when she tried changing topics, because she did not know the answers.

He should've just let her change topics so the judge could mark down the other team for changing topics. You could've won if your partner were less impetuous.

Yeah, it's true. It's not your partner's job to highlight the other team's faults. The judges would've picked up on that. Tip for next time: get a parter who knows when and how to hold his tongue.

I really didn't have much of a choice on who my partner was.The kid was was a last minute thing. We were only partners for three days before the tournament and according the coach he was the best middle school debater so I just went along with it.
The thing is I know I wouldn't have made it to the finals without him so I shouldn't get too mad at him

What system of debates do you use?

I used the Parlimentery System. Is yours court-based, or something?

Well it's public forum which has two teams of two debate each other. Here is a wikipedia of it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Forum_Debate.

Well, this contradicts my theory with Mark Antony and Octavious.