Chambers and Sessions
Students attending each tournament are divided up into groups of somewhere between ten to thirty (usually between fifteen to twenty). These groups are called chambers, Houses, or Senates, depending on the region and the tournament (some tournaments include both Houses and Senates).
Time-wise, a tournament is divided into several sessions, each of which are several hours long. If a tournament lasts several days, there is often one session on the first night of debate, followed by several more on the subsequent day.
In most tournaments, congressional debaters go through preliminaries, semifinals, and finals, though other tournaments break straight from prelims to finals or have no break rounds. The top ranked debaters in each chamber (usually top six or top eight) advance to the next round until they reach finals. Debaters below eighth in their chamber are usually left unranked.
Read more about this topic: Congressional Debate, Procedure
Famous quotes containing the word chambers:
“Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)