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I only watched a small part of it, but the atheists were tough to listen to because they were just throwing out words (assuming that they were real and proven things), so they were trying to just flood their various spiels with tons of terms, etc. ... but weren't debating the core issues.  That's actually an obnoxious technique that injected itself into High School and College debate, where the tendency of the judges was to award the debate to the person who threw out the MOST stuff.  So you had the phenomenon of speed-talkers winning the debates, and there was never any intellectual engagement between the two sides.  These teams would walk in with literal file cabinets on wheels and would pull out these "evidence" cards, which were just quotes, and the judge awarded each point to the team that produced (i.e. read) the most "evidence" cards for each point, and then the team that won the most points was awarded the debate, and the core intellectual disagreements were lost in the noise.  It got to the point of absurdity.  So the speed-talkers that could rip through the most cards along with the teams that had the biggest file cabinets invariably won, even if they engaged in no rational discussion whatsoever.  In the final rebuttal, teams would go through an outline of the points and say stuff like, "I.A.1 -- we: 4 cards, they 2 cards -- we win that point", and just go through the list.  So I switched over to Lincoln-Douglas debate format, hoping it would be different, and it was a little better, but the same nonsense.  Only difference with Lincoln-Douglas is that you debated by yourself and there were rounds where the topic was unknown ahead of time.  Yet people still found a way to bring in their file cabinets and go in the same direction there.

So in last night's debate, after they rattled off 30 things in two minutes, you would lose the point if you couldn't refute each an every one of them in the time you had.  And it's not possible to do any of it justice.  It was obvious to me that the atheists came from this absurd and sophistic debate background (High School and college debate), as I was in those circles for years before I got sick of it and quit.  What it had turned into was neither enjoyable nor worth my time.  At one point, I was on a team with a single partner, and we both agreed to walk in cold with ZERO evidence cards for any given debate.  We did nothing but argue from either memory or using our brains.  LOL ... we actually won a tournament unexpectedly, much to our surprise, since it appeared that the venue we were at had also become sick of the old "evidence card" speed-reading crap.

I only watched a small part of it, but the atheists were tough to listen to because they were just throwing out words (assuming that they were real and proven things), so they were trying to just flood their various spiels with tons of terms, etc. ... but weren't debating the core issues.  That's actually an obnoxious technique that injected itself into High School and College debate, where the tendency of the judges was to award the debate to the person who threw out the MOST stuff.  So you had the phenomenon of speed-talkers winning the debates, and there was never any intellectual engagement between the two sides.  These teams would walk in with literal file cabinets on wheels and would pull out these "evidence" cards, which were just quotes, and the judge awarded each point to the team that produced (i.e. read) the most "evidence" cards for each point, and then the team that won the most points was awarded the debate, and the core intellectual disagreements were lost in the noise.  It got to the point of absurdity.  So the speed-talkers that could rip through the most cards along with the teams that had the biggest file cabinets invariably won, even if they engaged in no rational discussion whatsoever.  In the final rebuttal, teams would go through an outline of the points and say stuff like, "I.A.1 -- we: 4 cards, they 2 cards -- we win that point", and just go through the list.  So I switched over to Lincoln-Douglas debate format, hoping it would be different, and it was a little better, but the same nonsense.  Only difference with Lincoln-Douglas is that you debated by yourself and there were rounds where the topic was unknown ahead of time.  Yet people still found a way to bring in their file cabinets and go in the same direction there.

So in last night's debate, after they rattled off 30 things in two minutes, you would lose the point if you couldn't refute each an every one of them in the time you had.  And it's not possible to do any of it justice.  It was obvious to me that the atheists came from this absurd and sophistic debate background (High School and college debate), as I was in those circles for years before I got sick of it and quit.  What it had turned into was neither enjoyable nor worth my time.  At one point, I was on a team with a single partner, and we both agreed to walk in cold with ZERO evidence cards for any given debate.  We did nothing but argue from either memory or using our brains.  LOL ... we actually won a tournament unexpectedly, much to our surprise, since it appeared that the venue we were at had also become sick of the old "evidence card" speed-reading crap.

So literally this then:


I had a debate class in college, and I vaguely remember it did not operate on that basis, but was more formal.

So literally this then:


I had a debate class in college, and I vaguely remember it did not operate on that basis, but was more formal.

Yep ... exactly this.  Apart from the fact that there's no serious intellectual discussion able to be had, due to the speed-reading style, these two are orders of magnitude worse than anyone I debated over the years.  That young lady was tripping over every other word and it was slowing her down.  She would have been destroyed by the real pro speed readers.  We all know why they won.

I see, however, that they now allow computers (we didn't even have laptops really when I was debating) ... to replace the file cabinets on wheels that people used to drag around.  So evidently all you have to do now is have a lot of research (I bet you can buy it online ... even in our day you could buy the research for the topic of each season, so I can only imagine what it's like now with the internet) and be able to read quickly (which these two couldn't even really pull off).  And their "championship" round was against two Black men who were ... rapping with music (so I never saw that garbage in my day).

Whatever that crap is, it's not a debate.  I always refused to debate that way, and so we always lost due to "judgment by quantity" vs. quality ... except that one debate where the judges had seen enough of that crap also.

With regard to your debate class, no, a class would not teach this style ... it was only to be found in the competitive debate circuit.