New findings from the School of Emergent Priorities show Master of Priority Studies students can name their day-one track months later, but not the evidence that would move them off it.
A survey of 214 Master of Priority Studies students finds the day-one track label recalled long after the evidence behind it is forgotten
The day-one diagnostic that sorts every Master of Priority Studies cohort into a Foundation or Fast-Track stream carries one condition on the label it assigns: it is advisory, and can be revisited at any time. The School of Emergent Priorities has now asked how many students still believe that.
Researchers surveyed 214 students across the 2025 and 2026 intakes, six months after each cohort’s diagnostic, asking first whether they could name their track and then, separately, whether they could name any evidence that would move them off it. Nearly nine in ten answered the first question without prompting. Fewer than one in twelve could answer the second, and the gap between the two answers held steady across both intakes surveyed.
For the School of Emergent Priorities, the gap sits alongside a longer-running question about how a label outlives the reasoning that assigned it, once advising conversations settle into treating the one as shorthand for the other.
You can hear which one the label is in the first thirty seconds of an advising conversation. You can go a whole semester and never hear the criteria mentioned at all.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities
“A day-one instrument that’s never revisited isn’t advisory in anything but name,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group in the School of Emergent Priorities. “We built in a review pathway. This is the first look at whether anyone uses it.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.70zdbl.