A School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement paper finds a handheld scoring app used at dog-obedience trials changes neither dispute rates nor handler-perceived fairness, and reports the state governing council mandating it anyway.
A stepped-wedge trial across twenty-two suburban dog-obedience clubs finds Fault-Tally moves no outcome that mattered, and the state council retires the paper scorecard regardless
The clock got faster. Nothing else did.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
A ten-round trial across twenty-two suburban dog-obedience clubs has found that swapping a judge’s paper scorecard for a handheld scoring app moved none of the three outcomes the trial was built to check, and the sport’s state governing council has made the app the only scoring method a registered trial may use regardless.
The study, led by Dr Anouk Mensah of the School of Emergent Priorities with Dr Renke Sabel of the School of Continuous Improvement, staggered the twenty-two clubs’ switch from paper to the app across a full competition season, comparing formal score disputes, handlers’ sense of fair treatment, and how closely two judges scored the same run. None of the three moved outside the range the trial had set in advance as no difference worth reporting.
“We set the bounds before we saw a single run, and the data landed inside them every time,” said Dr Sabel. “That’s not a disappointing result to us. It’s the trial working exactly as designed.”
The finding joins the School of Continuous Improvement’s wider record of instruments that outlive the case made for them, and the University counts the trial itself among the evaluation-ecosystem agenda’s clearer wins: not the app’s performance, but the discipline of reporting when it doesn’t.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xghi1d.