Current practices in intercollegiate debate encourage inadequate reasoning and the use of short cuts in debate presentations. Poor debate strategies have emerged. For example, the inclusion, by negative teams, of excessively detailed arguments in constructive speeches has caused affirmative rebuttals to be acutely simplistic or has forced affirmative teams to adopt devious or exotic plans in the hope that the negative will not have detailed, stock answers to use in refutation. Further, debate judges tend not to use the time allowed them to question some of the debaters' points or critique the debates. Improvements in debate programs could include the assignment of topics on several subjects for a debate year, the adoption of special wordings of topics for special tournaments, changes in the time format for debating, and some changes in the fee structures of tournaments to eliminate the awarding of excessive numbers of trophies. (CH)