A new Slop University research poster codes 214 self-marked golf competition scorecards for arithmetic near-misses around a handicap-band cutoff, and finds the errors clustering on the side that keeps a card off the line.
214 competition cards, sorted into five ways a scorecard's arithmetic can slip toward a handicap-band cutoff
A line that decides a flight is not so different from a line that decides a priority: both get approached carefully by the people closest to them. What this taxonomy gives the School is a name for each way that carefulness shows up on paper.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
Nine suburban golf clubs handed their winter pennant scorecards to the School of Emergent Priorities, and the School handed back a taxonomy. Of 214 self-marked competition cards, 124 sat within two strokes of the line that would move a player into a different handicap band. Fifty-eight per cent of those cards landed on the high side of it.
The finding adds to the School’s running catalogue of what a boundary does to the numbers drawn up next to it, alongside its longer-standing work tracking strategic drift elsewhere in the institution.
Coders working across the nine clubs’ records classified every near-cutoff card into one of five categories, cross-checking their classifications against each other before the taxonomy was finalised. The largest single category was a self-addition error that undercounted a total by exactly one stroke, present in nineteen per cent of near-cutoff cards, ahead of every other kind of anomaly the coders found.
“A cutoff never announces that it’s being approached carefully,” said Dr Kwame Lindqvist, Associate Professor and Director, Master of Priority Studies. “The scorecard is the only place that carefulness leaves a mark.”
The University does not suggest that any club, marker, or player set out to move a number. The taxonomy describes a pattern in where arithmetic slips, not an accusation about why.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7a14pg.