A Bioethics Bowl is a debate-style tournament between teams of undergraduates. Teams compete with each other in head-to-head matches by presenting responses to questions about cases related to bioethics, commenting on other team's presentations, and responding to commentary on their own presentation. Each team is evaluated at the end of the match by judges using predetermined criteria.
Each Bioethics Bowl is governed by the rules determined by the competition organizers. These include explicit rules about how to determine team rankings in a tournament accounting for wins, losses, and ties. To assist organizers, we will provide a rules template derived from the APPE IEB in our resource section.
Each Bioethics Bowl will use a set of cases determined by the competition organizers. These cases are usually 1-2 pages contextualizing a concrete issue in bioethics. Some competitions may use proprietary cases. At the organizer's discretion, cases may come with a set of questions, one of which will be the question asked in the competition. We provide a set of cases for public use here.
A successful Bioethics Bowl requires high-quality judging. We will provide some tips to organizers about recruiting judges and some advice to judges here.