I never encountered anything remotely like that. The judges for debates tended to be people with the ability to absorb encyclopedic knowledge about a topic and I never encountered a judge who wasn’t familiar with any and every source a team might have. The only “most likely to be accepted” only barely showed up because judges disagreed over the ranking of sources, e.g. does a piece by an investigative reported for the New York Times sit higher than a statement by a U.S. Congressman.
Teams that “cherry-picked” rarely made it even to quarter-finals because they generally ended up thin in overall information on the topic and/or ended up losing every round when they drew defense when they preferred offense. Indeed one measure of a team’s effort was how broad their sources were; a team with a narrow list of sources tended to be a team knocked out on the first round.
Substitute “the finals” for “truth” and that describes high school debate – just add that the debaters who regularly made it to quarter-finals spent the time that classmates used to watch sports searching through the latest publications for mention of anything related to the topic. My brother and I filled almost three drawers in a file cabinet with our research the year the topic was “Resolved: That Congress should prohibit unilateral United States military intervention in foreign countries.”, and more than that when the topic was “1970-1971 — Resolved: That the federal government should establish, finance, and administer programs to control air and/or water pollution in the United States”. We spent six or more hours per week tracking major publications, the Congressional Record, think tank reports, scientific papers, and even the evening talk shows just in case someone important in policy decisions happened to be on.
I think it was being on the debate team that taught me how to do research; I breezed through writing term papers while others struggled because I already knew how to dig for sources, how to evaluate those sources, and how to organize to led up to a conclusion in an argument that had to fit a given amount of space.
Oh – I also learned to talk fast. One of the regular comments from other speech contestants was that debaters talked faster than they thought was humanly possible. I remember watching the finals one tournament between two teams that had buried everyone they came up against (including my brother and I; both members of both teams had photographic memories . . . ) where anyone in the audience making the least noise would be ejected because those debaters talked fast enough even the judges were hard put to follow them.
Speaking of talking fast, here’s an example of debater-speak outside debate: “mungry, squeat” which is “I’m hungry, let’s go eat”, said faster than a regular person could finish the second syllable in ordinary speaking (by my senior year that was shortened to “gree-squeat”). Or in debate, “New York Times” came out “Nyorktems” quite often.
Another change so it matches debates: substitute “winning” for “learning” in the first sentence, then “winning” for “change” in the second.
That fits in particular the tournament where our top three debate teams met after the evening session and commandeered one of the motel rooms; we spread all of our material out on every available surface in order to totally re-evaluate our strategies because during the evening news there had been new policy statements from the White House and from a Senate committee; two of us kept one ear to the TV news for responses from anyone either known as a player (easy to track) or who might come up with a new angle or insight (pain in the butt).
Yeah, I have a problem with that, too. Some of the most important truths I’ve ever dealt with seemed to come in fits and starts. Others did arrive mostly “at once”, such as the realization that the Genesis Creation story fits a known ancient hear eastern literary category, but took years to work out how that makes Genesis 1 read so drastically different from traditional takes.
