What is Drop in debate?
debate term
Failing to answer an argument, which usually concedes it.
An argument is dropped when the responding team never answers it in the speech where a response was due. Debate’s working convention is that silence is consent: a dropped argument is treated as true for the rest of the round. That’s why flowing matters and why second-rebuttal coverage gets drilled so heavily. Not every drop is fatal, though. A dropped defensive argument costs little, while a dropped turn can lose the round by itself.