Debate Team at Worlds

Andrew Roraback '27 won second place in the impromptu speaking competition at the World Individual Debating and Public Speaking Championships in Bristol, UK, this April, defeating competitors from 18 different countries in the annual tournament. Andrew was joined by debate team captains Teo Everts '26 and Shaye Lee '26. Teo advanced to the finals in the parliamentary debate competition before being eliminated, and his combined scores across all competitions earned him 15th place overall out of a field of 109 competitors. 

"Worlds was super fun," Teo said. "There was good camaraderie amongst the Americans, and it was also great to meet the international debaters. I really enjoyed seeing how their speaking and argumentation styles differed from ours, and I think we all learned from the experience."

Ethics Olympiad

A team of four Hotchkiss students advanced to the International Grand Finals tournament, TKEthics’s annual Ethics Olympiad. Jeremy Fang ’28, Bella Chen ’29, DH Lee ’28, and Ashley Zhu ’29 came in fourth in a field of 34 teams from around the Western hemisphere in the Pan American Ethics Olympiad on April 4, securing a spot for Hotchkiss in the International Grand Finals with other top teams from around the world.

Bella, a member of Hotchkiss’s Ethics Bowl team, was the only one of the four team members who had competed in an Ethics Olympiad-style tournament before. 

Ethics Olympiads, like Ethics Bowls, provide teams with sets of cases that pose difficult moral or political dilemmas. Each team is randomly assigned a scenario each round, and teams are scored on the depth of their analysis of their scenario and on the quality of their collaborative commentary on their opponents’ analyses.

The Grand Finals will be held in Australia on Aug. 29, with teams competing via Zoom.