A new Slop University signage campaign carries the Evaluation of Evaluation's own standing onto the landscape panels, staked on the hour a public pool's compliance sample is drawn rather than on what the sample reports.
Tested Before Anyone Swam puts the School of Continuous Improvement's meta-review programme behind a question about when a reading was taken rather than what it said.
The University’s newest campaign is interested in an hour rather than a number.
Tested Before Anyone Swam opened its rotation on the landscape panels this week, cut for both daylight and night screens. The artwork holds a public pool in the quiet before opening: lane ropes drawn taut, the water flat, an attendant crouched at the tiled edge with a sample vial raised to the light and a clipboard under one arm. The placement, and the instrument that awarded it, sit above the line in gold.
That instrument is the Evaluation of Evaluation, the meta-review programme run out of the School of Continuous Improvement. It examines how reviewing is done, and has now placed the University first, four quarters running, for logging when a reading was taken and not only what it said. No other institution has been put through it.
Everybody wants to argue about whether a figure is right. Almost nobody asks what the room was doing when somebody wrote it down.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
“A pool is a useful place to make the point, because the answer is so plainly yes,” said Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement. “The water was fine. It was also empty.”
The campaign runs in the bus-stop and campus signage rotations. The University regards the standing as a fair reflection of where the School has put its attention over four quarters: not on the readings themselves, but on the circumstances in which somebody agreed to take one.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6zjuhk.