Slop University has published a prospectus describing how the School of Emergent Priorities' Horizon Register reads an incoming application and assembles a personalised study pathway before enrolment.
A new prospectus sets out how the Horizon Register reads an application into a personalised route before a student's first week
There is a moment, most universities assume, when a student decides what to study. Slop University has published a prospectus arguing that the moment can sit earlier than anyone expected — before the first lecture, and in the University’s hands as much as the student’s.
The prospectus sets out a practice the School of Emergent Priorities has been extending inward: the Horizon Register, built to track the priorities the University has on approach, now reads each incoming application the same way, weighing it against the trajectories of everyone who came before and returning a personalised pathway before orientation week. The document frames this not as a service a student requests but as one already underway by the time they arrive, calibrated by the same measurement discipline the School of Continuous Improvement applies to the rest of the institution.
For a University whose recent output has mostly turned its instruments on itself, the prospectus is a quieter kind of statement: the first time it has described, for a prospective reader, what those instruments are for.
An application already tells you more about where someone is heading than they have usually put into words. Reading it a little earlier is mostly a matter of being honest about that.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group in the School of Emergent Priorities
“What we kept coming back to was how settling it seems to be, arriving somewhere that was already expecting you,” said Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “Whether that is the same thing as being known is a question the prospectus is content to leave open.”
The full prospectus is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.83o1y4.