Debate Placement Quiz
Updated 4/10/03
1. What’s a counterplan?
2. What’s a permutation?
3. What do we mean when we say a counterplan is net beneficial?
4. You are on the affirmative side in a debate arguing for restrictions on the oil shipping
industry to reduce oil spills. The negative team argues that your plan would be very popular,
causing President Bush to gain enough credibility to push through his tax cut, which would
collapse the economy, causing wars. Explain what argument(s) you might make to link turn
the disadvantage.
5. Using the above scenario, explain what argument(s) you might make to impact turn the
disadvantage.
6. People say that you should never link turn and impact turn the same disadvantage. Why
not?
7. What is uniqueness?
7. What’s a critique?
Answers for diagnostic quiz
1. A counterplan is a plan offered by the negative team that is counter to the affirmative’s
plan in that it demonstrates a more beneficial opportunity that would be lost by adopting the
affirmative plan.
2. A permutation is an affirmative argument designed to test whether or not the counterplan
is, in fact, a reason to reject the plan. A permutation is a hypothetical combination of the
plan and all or any part of the counterplan.
3. A counterplan is net beneficial when the counterplan alone would be better than the plan
alone or the plan and any part of the counterplan.
4. Turn: the plan would be extremely unpopular, reducing Bush’s already high credibility.
(Any variation of this will probably do)
5. Turn: Economic growth is bad, because it hurts the environment, causing bad things to
happen. Or Turn: Economic growth actually causes wars. Again, any variation on these will
probably do.
6. Because to do so creates a new disadvantage against your side. For example, in this case, if
you were to argue that your plan hurt Bush’s credibility and that economic growth was bad,
you would be proving that your plan caused something bad to happen.
7. Uniqueness is an argument used to show that some consequence will not happen in the
current system – that everything is fine now. When you argue that an advantage or
disadvantage is non-unique, you are saying that the bad consequence is happening now or
will happen in the future.
8. A critique argument is an argument that uncovers and analyzes the fundamental
assumptions of an argument made by the other side, and uses that critical analysis to win the
argument or the debate.