Mock Trial

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What is Mock Trial?

Mock trial is a competitive activity where high school and college students simulate real court cases. Teams are divided into prosecution/plaintiff and defense, and students play the roles of attorneys and witnesses. Over the course of a season, competitors argue multiple cases in front of judges, who score each attorney speech and witness performance on a numeric scale (commonly 1–10). These scores determine which team wins a “ballot,” but they also provide a rich dataset of individual contributions to team performance.

What does this project do?

This project takes the raw scoring sheets from an entire season and transforms them into a Performance Above Replacement (PAR) metric for each competitor:

  1. Normalize by ballot: Each ballot is different—some judges are generous, others strict. To account for this, the code calculates the average score for each role and performance type within each ballot (e.g., “direct examination of a witness on Ballot 12”).

  2. Relative difference: A competitor’s individual score is compared to that ballot’s average. If they outperformed the baseline, they receive a positive adjustment; if they underperformed, a negative one.

  3. Aggregate over time: These adjustments are summed across tournaments, roles, and score types to generate an individual +/- style measure of impact, much like baseball’s WAR (Wins Above Replacement).

  4. Outputs:

    • Tables summarizing totals by player, role, and tournament.

    • Visualizations to show how consistently each competitor contributed above or below average.

    • PDF and HTML reports created with R and Quarto for reproducibility and easy sharing.

Opponents remain part of the calculation baseline (since they shape the ballot average) but are excluded from displays, so the focus stays on your own team’s performance.

Why does this matter?

For coaches, this analysis provides a clear picture of:

  • Which students are consistently performing above the mean across judges.

  • Role-based strengths (e.g., excelling on cross examinations vs. weaker on speeches).

  • Tournament-by-tournament development, making it easier to allocate roles strategically.

In short: the code converts subjective, judge-by-judge mock trial scoring into a reliable, comparative performance metric—a tool for evidence-based coaching decisions.