This past weekend, the Public Forum team participated in their most competitive debate tournament of the year so far. The Harvard tournament hosts multiple skill and age levels and sees competition from around the country and world. Over 5,000 individual students entered into the competition across the numerous events, with over 280 entries in Middle School Public Forum alone! The number of entries made the break incredibly competitive, requiring 4 wins out of 5 preliminary rounds to secure a spot in the Triple Octofinal rounds (Top 64). The debate topic required students to dive into the world of NATO and analyze Turkey’s membership as either beneficial or harmful. Across two full days of competition and very early mornings, Claire Liu and Joyce Zhang went 4-1 in preliminary rounds and advanced to the Triple Octofinal! They went on to win that round and broke into the top 32! Huge congratulations to Claire and Joyce for representing Kudos at such a prestigious tournament. Our team’s cases were complex and well reasoned; their skill and intelligence is impressive.

On to the Congress results! Shoutouts to Katherine Duan and Michelle Zhang for being next out with Tim Cai placing just one rank behind Katherine. Those three as well as Evelyn Lam, Juliana Cui, Kelly Liu, Michelle Pan, Sanju Chanumalla, Linda Jiang, Anne Liu, and Serena Guo, for not getting a single nine throughout all of prelims. Specifically, Evelyn and Serena didn’t get a rank below 3rd in prelims, Juliana didn’t get a rank below 4th, plus Anne and Michelle P below 5th. Praise is deserved for Ethan Li, Apollo Lee, and Edwin Jiao for getting 3,2, and 1 top eight rank respectively at their first invitational tournament outside of SCJFL.

Anne, Serena, and Evelyn broke to elimination rounds for the second year in a row. They were joined by Michelle P, Juliana and Kelly. Despite each of them being the two seed coming out of their chamber, Serena and Evelyn had the 6th and 7th best cumes going into semis, with scores better than or equal to five of the #1 seeds. In the semifinal, Serena, Juliana and Michelle all continued their trend of not getting a single nine, with Evelyn just one rank off of doing the same. Serena, Juliana, Michelle and Anne advanced to the final round, with Michelle placing 1st after AGAIN getting all ranks 5th or better! Michelle did unfortunately pick up a six and two sevens in the final leading to her taking 5th overall. However, to get top seven from ALL 17 JUDGES over the course of the weekend is a mind boggling accomplishment. Anne and Juliana took 10th and 11th in the final respectively with Anne getting the 3 from the parliamentarian. Finally, Serena was the TOURNAMENT RUNNER UP at 2nd overall!

Furthermore, the tournament recognized Michelle P, Evelyn, Serena and Tim for winning a presiding officer election in prelims. Juliana joined Michelle and Julianna by winning their PO contest in semis and Michelle went for the hat trick as she also won the vote in finals.

Somehow we’re not done! Similar to the National Tournament, Harvard Congress has a Special Accolade that honors the student that displayed “the most leadership” in round by making motions, setting a docket and understanding parliamentary procedures. After calculating the votes submitted by the other students in their chamber, Evelyn, Michelle, Anne and Serena won their prelim leadership award. Michelle and Serena were joined by Julianna when all three of them won the leadership award in the semifinal, with Michelle winning the award in finals.

For the second year in a row, not a single program in the nation had more students in the final round than Kudos, but this year there were no ties as Kudos definitely had more finalists in middle school congress than any school nationwide. On top of that we had more Presiding Officers Winners and Leadership award winners than EVERY team that entered middle school congress as we took home eight in each category. With a whopping 233 team points Kudos was the TOP CONGRESS PROGRAM IN THE MS DIVISION NATION AT HARVARD!!!

With such high level competition I want to congratulate each student, break or no break. I consistently received feedback from teams and judges that our students as well as other middle schoolers were consistently having better cases and debates than the High Schoolers were. This is a huge accomplishment to be able to discuss such a complex geopolitical issue and to shine in the eyes of adults at such a young age. I look forward to our continued success in upcoming tournaments!

Here’s the results and pictures: