NCFCA At-Large system

The NCFCA awards a portion of the slots to the NCFCA National Championship through the "at-large" system, which is a point system based on a team's performance in regional qualifying tournaments. Teams that consistently do well throughout the season, but (for whatever reason) fail to qualify through the usual routes, may earn a slot through the At-Large system.

In the past, the formula used to calculate at-large points was a secret, but it is now publicly available on the NCFCA website.

Formula
Two separate elements are calculated and added together to determine a competitor's final at-large score:


 * Final placing score: Competitors that break to outrounds receive points based on their final placing. Points are calculated by dividing the total number of competitors in that event by their final placing: for example, a competitor who placed 4th in Impromptu at a tournament with 60 Impromptu competitors would receive 15 Final Placing points (60 divided by 4). First-place finishers are an exception: their Final Placing points are calculated by dividing the number of competitors by 2 and adding 1. (For example, the first-place finisher in the above example would receive 31 points - 60 divided by 2 plus 1.)


 * A competitor's top three tournament finishes in an event are used to calculate their total Final Placing score for the season. (It is not specified whether "top tournament finishes" refers to raw rankings like 1st or 2nd, or to the total number of points earned, but it is generally assumed to refer to the latter.)


 * Speech events with only a single room of competitors do not receive Final Placing points for that tournament.


 * Preliminary placing score: Competitors also receive points based on their performance in preliminary rounds:


 * Debate : Teams with a 6-0 record receive 3 points, teams with a 5-1 record receive 2 points, and teams with a 4-2 record receive 1 point.


 * Speech : Points are determined by ranking all the competitors in an event by their prelim ballots. The first-place speaker in an event receives 3 points, the second-place speaker receives 2 points, and the third-place speaker receives 1 point.


 * As with debate, a competitor's top three preliminary finishes in an event are used to calculate their total Preliminary Placing score for the season.

Note that placing points and preliminary points are tabulated separately, so the top three tournaments in placing points may not be the same as the top three tournaments in preliminary points.

Calculation difficulties
It is generally straightforward to calculate debate At-Large points independently, provided that the person doing the calculations knows (a) the total number of competitors at each tournament, and (b) the prelim records of the top teams. Prelim records are not generally announced, but can usually be determined logically from the final few rounds of powermatching and what opponents each team was placed against in outrounds.

Calculating speech At-Large points is considerably more difficult, because the person doing the calculations cannot easily determine the Preliminary Placing score of a particular competitor. However, including just final placing scores is generally sufficient to predict the top several competitors with reasonable confidence.