A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks a casual-tutor marking room after a badge-tap rule, finding the marking simply moved to unbadged rooms while the requirement went unreviewed for a year.
An interrupted time-series across three marking rooms finds the work shifted next door and the rule was never revisited
A scare over rounded-up timesheets, and a quick fix that outlasted it by a year. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities follows a casual-tutor marking room from the day it acquired a badge reader to the day nobody thought to ask whether it still needed one, and finds the reader did less to verify the hours logged inside it than to send those hours next door.
A control put in for one quarter’s problem does not switch itself off when the quarter ends. Someone has to decide it is finished, and mostly no one is asked to.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The University places the study within its wider anticipatory-capability programme, which it frames as the discipline of retiring a measure on the same evidence that first raised it. In outline, the work sets the badged room’s door-reader counts against sign-in logs from two comparable rooms with no reader, across a twenty-week window bracketing the rollout, and reads the three series together rather than treating the badged room’s emptying as marking that stopped. Badged-room use fell from a pre-rollout mean of 39 tutor-sessions a week to 8, while the two unbadged rooms took up almost exactly the difference.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, who co-authored the poster, said the more telling record was the one that stayed empty: “the requirement generated twelve months of compliance data and not a single line asking whether it was still the right requirement.” The poster closes on a proposed sunset clause tied to the finding that prompted a control, rather than to a fixed review date that a busy quarter can quietly skip.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cqmkhr.