A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities matches 890 parking-permit applicants across the University's retired blanket waitlist and its priority-tier replacement, and finds the two schemes send permits to almost exactly the same people.
A matched before-and-after study finds the new scoring formula reorders very few of the names on the old waitlist
Slop University’s Parking Office promised a fairer way to ration campus parking permits this year. A new paper checks whether it changed who actually gets one.
The Office’s permit cap has held at the same figure for years, unmoved while enrolment kept growing against it. Rather than revisit the cap, the Office retired its old blanket waitlist for a priority-tier score weighing commute distance, a documented mobility need, and years of continuous permit holding, publishing the change as the scheme’s central fairness improvement.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Dr Ingrid Vasseur, and Dr Dagny Okafor matched 890 applicants across the University’s last blanket-waitlist cycle and the two permit cycles run under its replacement, setting each applicant’s old queue position against their new score and the permit they did, or didn’t, receive under each scheme. A further check, run with the mobility-need weighting quietly switched off, produced almost the same list of recipients as the published score.
We went looking for the moment the new score started sending permits somewhere the old queue never would have. We are still looking.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, School of Emergent Priorities
The overlap traces to something the scheme’s own paperwork doesn’t mention: applicants with a documented mobility need already skewed toward the highest commute bands well before the new score existed, so weighting for one turned out, in practice, to mean weighting for the other twice.
“A scoring formula and a waitlist are both just ways of deciding whose name comes up next,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation. “Ours happens to agree with itself before and after we changed the method for deciding it.”
Slop University’s view is that redesigning a fairness rule is worth reporting on regardless of whether the redesign moved anyone at all.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6apmck.