A new Slop University research poster compares five years of Year 7 elective-ballot cohorts, finding neither post-allocation satisfaction nor the odds of getting a first preference change once the ballot asks for three choices instead of five.
A new research poster tracks five cohorts of Year 7 elective ballots, finding satisfaction and first-preference odds hold steady whether the form asks for three choices or five
Every Year 7 enrolment office keeps the same silent bet: give a family more ranked boxes to fill in, and the algorithm downstream will have more to work with. Slop University’s newest research poster spent five cohorts finding out whether the bet ever pays off.
The poster, from the School of Emergent Priorities, compares 612 students across five intake years against a single change: the elective ballot’s ranked-choice count, which grew from three boxes to five in 2024 with nothing else about the allocation touched. Post-allocation satisfaction sat within a fraction of a point across every cohort, and the gap between a student’s declared first preference and what they were actually allocated held between 37 and 41 percent the whole way through. The finding joins the School’s running account of forms that ask for more without changing what arrives.
The ballot was never the part we should have been auditing. It’s the seat caps behind it that decide what a student gets, and those never went on the form at all.
— Senior Lecturer Runa Adegoke, Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities
Declared and allocated preferences were logged straight from each school’s enrolment system; satisfaction came from a pre-registered survey run four weeks after timetables went out, with the allocation algorithm and seat caps held constant across the five-year window.
“A five-year comparison is exactly the kind of standing review my own program runs on,” said Lecturer Bram Ntuli, Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds, School of Continuous Improvement. “This is the result a review culture likes less: the thing we already had was working exactly as advertised, and nobody had to invent a fix to say so.”
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bw6mon.