A new Slop University research poster times everything that happens around a graded music examination and finds the funding return consumes more effort than the examination and the examiner's report combined.
A work-sampling study across fourteen community venues puts 217 minutes of recorded person-time around each candidate's 11.6 minutes at the instrument
Observers sat through 214 graded music examinations at fourteen community venues this winter and timed everything that happened around them. Twelve Minutes Played, Four Hours Recorded, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, sets the 11.6 minutes a candidate spends at the instrument against the 217 minutes of recorded person-time the same candidate generates across seven roles.
The largest single consumer of that time is reconciling the return by which examinations completed are counted for funding. The examiner’s written report, the one document addressed to the child’s playing, is the shortest item in the account.
We did not go looking for a villain and we did not find one. Everybody we watched was producing something a later reader would need. The interesting part is which reader.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey
Every observed minute was attributed to one of seven roles and one of nine artefacts, on a list settled before the first venue opened, with no role invited to account for its own time. The design continues the School’s interest in the gap between what an institution schedules and what its calendar turns out to hold.
Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, said the round had given the team “a rare chance to watch an obligation and its record in the same room, and to see which of the two was under time pressure.” The University regards the poster as a useful addition to its account of what ordinary occasions cost once they are written down, and the School has flagged a matched observation of the summer round.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2a606w.