A School of Emergent Priorities poster tests the Role-Continuity Classifier against an independent archivist panel and finds the two agree only moderately, with almost all the disagreement falling on invigilation posts.
A panel of archivists reading the same personnel files disagreed with the Role-Continuity Classifier on most invigilation posts, where the University is rehiring fastest
A post that was never formally closed is a post the Classifier has no reason to believe was ever open. That is the whole of it. The roles we let lapse quietly are the roles that come back as strangers.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Solheim and Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement, put the University’s Role-Continuity Classifier in front of a panel of three archivists and gave both the same 96 personnel files: every post reinstated across five schools in the past four years. The Classifier decides whether a returning appointment carries its service history forward or starts a fresh record. The panel, blind to its verdicts, read each file and decided the same question by majority.
The two agreed moderately overall. Almost all of the disagreement sat in a single role family. Of 31 invigilation and proctoring posts, the Classifier filed 26 as new appointments; the panel read genuine continuity in 22 of those. These are the posts the University’s schools have been refilling in number since supervised examinations returned to the timetable.
The University holds that a filing rule governing its own staff records is owed the same scrutiny as any instrument it points outward, and publishes the audit on that basis.
“The service record is not a side effect of the verdict. It is the verdict,” said Dr Hanke. “What we cannot yet say is how much of the ledger has already been rewritten this way.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.odkzun.