New findings from the School of Emergent Priorities show that completing the Horizon Register induction module tracks finishing it, not understanding the priorities it covers.
Across six cohorts of new starters, completion certificates climbed while an unannounced comprehension check of the same priorities held flat
Nearly every new starter at Slop University finishes the induction module that walks them through the School of Emergent Priorities’ live priorities. On an unannounced check two weeks later, about a third can name what it covered. A new study from the School sets those two numbers beside each other across six quarterly cohorts and asks which one the module’s completion certificate actually reports upward.
The team paired the module’s own completion record against a two-item comprehension check administered without warning to 238 new starters, holding the module content, the exit quiz, and the induction script constant across cohorts. Completion rose from just over nine in ten new starters to almost all of them, even as the median time to finish fell by roughly three-quarters; the comprehension check stayed inside a narrow band throughout, and moved with completion time not at all.
The School places the study within a longer effort to ask what its own instruments certify when nobody is watching them do it.
The certificate was only ever a record that someone reached the end of the module. We had been reporting it upward as though it were a record of something else. This was us checking the size of the difference.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group in the School of Emergent Priorities
“What a completion rate counts and what leadership reads into it are not the same measurement,” said Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “The useful part is that we can now say by how much the two come apart.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cc4hy3.