Blog · Why it matters
What a 70 means at every level: 12,233 World Schools speeches
3rd Best APDA Debater · TOC Semifinalist · Columbia Debate Society Coach
Reviewed by Biser Angelov · Coaches Bulgaria’s national team
World Schools speeches are scored from 60 to 80, with 70 as average. Our analysis of the WSDC 2026 tab showed what that looks like at the world championship. This time we went wider: 12,233 substantive speeches by 3,047 speakers at 17 tournaments whose speaker tabs are public, from a beginners' tournament to Worlds. The scale turns out to be even narrower than the rulebook suggests, the same score means very different things at different levels, and a single round tells you less than most students think.
84%
of all 12,233 speeches scored between 68 and 72
1 in 100
speeches scored 74 or higher
2.5 pts
median gap between a speaker’s best and worst round
The whole sport fits inside four points
Pool every speech in the data and the median is 70.2, almost exactly the anchor the World Schools judging criteria set. The spread is the surprise. 84% of speeches landed between 68 and 72, and 95% between 67 and 73. Only 1.1% reached 74, only 0.16% reached 75, and about 1 in 300 fell below 65. The official scale has twenty points; judges use about six of them.
Averaged across a whole tournament, the ladder is shorter still. Among speakers with three or more speeches, the median speaker averaged 70.3, the top quarter 71.1 or more, the top 10% 71.8, and the top 1% 72.9. The best average at any of the 17 tournaments was 73.7, at Worlds.
The same 70 means different things at different levels
The median speech rises from 69 at the beginners' tournament to 71 at the world championship. Two points sounds small until you see what it does to a single score. At the beginners' tournament, a 70 sat at the 68th percentile of all speeches. At WSDC 2026, the same 70 sat at the 28th.
Where a 70 lands
Percentile of a 70 among all speeches at each level
High scores thin out the same way. A 72 or better was 1 speech in 17 at the beginners' tournament and 1 in 4 at Worlds. That does not mean beginner judges are harsh. Judges mostly score against the room they are in, so a beginner who earns a 72 has beaten about the same share of their field (96%) as a Worlds speaker who earns a 73.5.
| Level | Tournaments | Speeches | Median | Middle 80% | 72 or higher |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | Beginners WSDC 2026 | 191 | 69.0 | 67.0–71.0 | 5.8% |
| Junior | IJWSDC 2025 | 201 | 70.0 | 68.0–71.0 | 5.0% |
| National (UAE) | UAE WSDC 2026 | 264 | 68.6 | 67.0–70.5 | 2.7% |
| Novice | Novice WSDC 2024, 2025, 2026 | 1,285 | 70.0 | 68.0–72.0 | 16.0% |
| Open (international) | 7 open tournaments, 2024–26 | 6,805 | 70.0 | 68.0–72.0 | 16.0% |
| Open (US) | Penn WSDC 2025 | 667 | 70.3 | 68.5–72.0 | 15.9% |
| Pre-WSDC national-team prep | Austria WSDC, Seasons Pre-WSDC 2025 | 1,100 | 70.5 | 68.5–72.3 | 19.5% |
| National teams | WSDC 2026 | 1,720 | 71.0 | 68.7–72.8 | 25.3% |
One round tells you less than you think
We followed every speaker who gave four or more scored speeches at the same tournament, 1,928 of them. The median gap between their best and worst round was 2.5 points. Three speakers in four had a gap of at least 2 points, and 39% had a gap of 3 or more. On a scale where the top 1% of speakers average 72.9, that is the difference between an average round and a very good one, from the same person in the same week.
First rounds are the clearest case. Speakers who scored 68 or lower in round one averaged 69.0 across their remaining rounds. Speakers who scored 72 or higher in round one averaged 71.3 afterwards. A four-point gap after one round shrank to about two by the end of the tournament. Some of that is the draw, the motion and the judge; some of it is nerves. Either way, a student should read a tournament average, not a single ballot, and a coach should look at the written reasons before the number. Our printable judging ballot is built around those reasons.
What this means for a student
Moving a tournament average from 70 to 71.8 takes a speaker from the middle of the data to its top 10%. That is a realistic season goal, and it is mostly won on the criteria judges reward consistently: clear weighing, a case that holds up under rebuttal, and a reply speech that tells the judge how to decide. For newer debaters in our Foundation classes, the round-to-round numbers above point to the first job: narrow the gap between bad rounds and good ones before chasing great ones.
Data, method and caveats
- Source. Public Tabbycat speaker tabs for 17 World Schools tournaments held 2024–26, collected in September 2026. Each tab URL is listed in the download below. Only substantive speeches (scored 60–80) are counted; reply speeches and elimination rounds are not in these tabs.
- Levels. We grouped tournaments by who enters them: beginner, junior, novice, open, pre-WSDC national-team preparation, and the world championship. The UAE national tournament is shown on its own. Beginner, junior, UAE and Worlds are one tournament each, so treat those rows as single examples, not averages for the level.
- Comparisons. Judges score partly relative to the field, so a median at one level is not a measure of the same skill at another. The percentile figures describe where a score sits within each tournament’s own speeches.
- Privacy. Tabs name speakers publicly, but we publish no names and the download holds aggregates only.
- Gaps. The WSDC 2024 and 2025 speaker tabs are not public, so the world championship row is 2026 only.
Download the per-tournament figures: world-schools-speaker-scores-by-level.csv. If you cite these numbers, please credit “WSDC Prep analysis of 17 public World Schools speaker tabs, 2024–26” and link to this page.
Common questions
What is a good speaker score in World Schools debate?
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It depends on the room. Across 12,233 substantive speeches at 17 tournaments, the median was 70.2 and 84% of all speeches scored between 68 and 72. At a beginner tournament a 70 beat about two thirds of the field; at the 2026 world championship it beat about a quarter. Among speakers with three or more speeches, an average of 71.8 or more puts a speaker in the top 10% of the data.
How much do speaker points vary from round to round?
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More than most students expect. Among 1,928 speakers with four or more scored speeches, the median gap between a speaker’s best and worst round was 2.5 points, and 39% had a gap of 3 points or more. A typical speaker’s scores move by about one point from round to round, which is a large share of the whole scale in practice.
Does a bad first round mean a bad tournament?
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Usually less bad than it looks. Speakers who scored 68 or lower in their first round averaged 69.0 for the rest of the tournament, and speakers who scored 72 or higher in round one averaged 71.3 afterwards. A four-point gap after one round shrank to about two points by the end.
Why are speaker points so compressed?
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Judges are trained to anchor on 70 and move for named reasons, and most of them score relative to the field in front of them. The result is that a speech scoring 74 or higher happens about once in every hundred, and about 1 in 300 speeches scores below 65, even though the official range runs from 60 to 80.
Know where your scores really sit.
Every judged practice round in our programs is scored on the same 60–80 scale, with written feedback, so students learn what moves a 70 to a 72.