A School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement paper finds a committee-ratified ranking algorithm produced no change in challenge-forfeit rates across a season of a suburban tennis ladder, and reports the pennant association extending the algorithm to all fourteen divisions regardless.
A weighted ranking algorithm replaced one division's paper challenge board, and the region's pennant association is expanding it regardless of the result
Nobody applauds a null result at a committee meeting. We would like it minuted anyway.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
A season-long field comparison at one division of a regional weeknight tennis pennant association finds that swapping a paper challenge board for a committee-ratified ranking algorithm changed how the division’s ladder was calculated and nothing about how often a scheduled challenge was actually played, a new paper from Slop University’s School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement reports. The association’s committee has voted to extend the algorithm to all fourteen divisions from next season.
The team compared the pilot division’s challenge-forfeit rate against thirteen divisions that kept the original board across the same sixteen-week season, and against the pilot division’s own record from the season before the algorithm arrived. Both comparisons landed inside the equivalence bounds the working group had set for itself before a single match was scheduled.
“The finding doesn’t close the file for us,” said Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities. “A charter that keeps expanding after its own evidence comes back flat is exactly the kind of practice our program exists to keep watching.”
The result is being folded into the University’s growing record of what a committee does once it has a number, whatever the number turns out to say. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1vvv9o.