A School of Emergent Priorities poster audits committee minutes behind the University's return to supervised examinations and finds the recorded justification seldom names the incident that was live when the item was first tabled.
A poster cross-reads 24 decisions returning finals to in-person invigilation against the dated integrity log, and finds the reason a committee minutes is rarely the one that put the item on the agenda
A committee’s reason is written down once, at the end. By then the concern that first raised the item may be months old, and something else may be the worry of the day. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities asks which of the two the minute keeps.
Dr Marek Solheim, Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Convenor of Futures in Committee, and Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, took the 24 decisions by which the University returned its finals to in-person invigilation and set each minuted justification against the dated integrity log as it stood on the day the item was first tabled. Three coders, blind to the teaching period, scored whether the two named the same incident. Agreement among them was high. Agreement between the minutes and the log was not: the median item took seven and a half months to resolve, and no reversal minuted after the second half of 2024 cites the incident that prompted it. Interviewed separately, the chairs named that incident more often than their own minutes did.
The chairs have not forgotten anything. The record has. It holds the reason that was available when someone finally sat down to write it.
— Dr Solheim
The University considers the paperwork of its own decisions a fit subject for research, and welcomes the questions this raises about what its archive is for.
“We will review these decisions against what the minute says, because that is what a review reads,” said Professor Marris. “That is the part worth sitting with.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bshiuh.