A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys 612 commencing students at week nine, finding many can still name the admission-pathway lanyard colour orientation staff assigned them, and that students in the alternative-entry colour report a small, growing gap in how they say they're treated.
A week-nine survey of 612 commencing students finds the grey-gold treatment gap widening long after the sorting scheme was meant to end
Nine weeks after orientation, most commencing students can still say which colour lanyard they wore — and for one of the two colours, that memory comes with a cost.
The lanyard scheme was built for a single Monday: colour by admission pathway, so tour leaders could route ATAR-entry and alternative-entry groups to pathway-tailored campus tours. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds the colour outlived its Monday. Surveyed at week nine, more than half of 612 commencing students could still name their own lanyard colour, and students who wore the alternative-entry grey reported a small but steadily widening sense of being treated differently by tutors and peers — a gap gold-lanyard students did not describe.
The School reads the finding as confirmation of what its anticipatory-capability agenda has long argued: a system built to answer one question rarely retires just because the question is settled.
A lanyard is supposed to come off at the end of the day. Ours apparently doesn’t.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
“Nothing about this scheme was designed to last past Monday morning,” said Dr Marek Solheim. “We’re interested in what a system keeps doing once nobody’s watching it anymore.”
The method, in brief: a week-nine survey paired self-reported lanyard-colour recall with a five-item scale of perceived treatment, timed and ordered at random so no student could anticipate what the questionnaire was really asking, with tutors kept unaware of the study’s subject throughout.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.5ylchv.