National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence
The National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence (NPTE) is an invitation only end-of-season debate tournament for competitors in the National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA) variant of parliamentary debate in the United States.
The tournament was established in 2001 by various members of the National Parliamentary Debate Association to address "the lack of a parliamentary debate tournament that focused on year-long performance."[1] Since its establishment, the tournament has been held yearly. Today, the top 24 ranked NPDA teams are invited to debate at the NPTE. Each team's ranking is determined by the accumulation of points based on their performance at tournaments across the season.
Structure of the NPTE
[edit]The NPTE is differentiated from the NPDA National Championship Tournament by two primary characteristics:
- The tournament includes a public solicitation and deliberation process to determine the resolutions debated at the tournament. This process allows NPDA members to propose resolutions for the tournament which then get voted on by tournament competitors. The selected resolutions are published approximately one to two months before the tournament, enabling teams to prepare their strategies prior to their rounds. This stands in contrast to traditional parliamentary debate practices (practiced by a majority of NPDA tournaments, APDA tournaments, and British Parliamentary tournaments) in which resolutions are not announced until approximately 15–30 minutes before the round begins.
- Each preliminary round is judged by two judges (as opposed to one judge) and elimination rounds are conducted through a double elimination bracket.
Historically, the NPTE has undergone a variety of changes to tournament structure based on member requests and the actions of the organization's Board.
Recent Changes to Tournament Structure
[edit]As of 2025,[2] the NPTE has implemented a new procedure to determine who advances from preliminary rounds to elimination rounds. Rather than having a field in which each entered team could debate against any other entered team, teams were placed into groups based on their year-long ranking, similar to the process used by the World Cup. Teams then debate against each other team in their group, with the top two teams from each group advancing to elimination rounds. This creates four groups of six teams, and an elimination bracket that has the best eight teams from the group stage.
NPTE Results
[edit]- ^ https://www.nptedebate.com/about
- ^ "NPTE 2025 Info". National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence. Retrieved 2025-03-15.