A School of Emergent Priorities research poster surveys 386 dog-agility handlers across nineteen suburban clubs for the fault count that precedes a request to be regraded, and finds four clubs now apply the resulting threshold automatically.
A season-long survey of 386 handlers across nineteen suburban dog-agility clubs finds a four-fault threshold that four clubs now use to regrade competitors automatically
Four faulted runs, a new School of Emergent Priorities poster reports, is enough on average to make a dog-agility handler start asking to move down a grade — and four suburban clubs have stopped waiting for the question, adopting the count as an automatic regrading rule instead.
Handlers already knew where the threshold was. We just wrote it down.
— Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Anouk Mensah, School of Emergent Priorities
The poster, unveiled today, draws on a season-long threshold-recall survey fielded across nineteen suburban agility clubs, cross-checked against judges’ own fault sheets and modelled against each handler’s tenure and grade. Four of the clubs surveyed have since folded the resulting four-fault median into a standing regrading rule, applied without an assessor’s discretion once the count is reached.
“The rule doesn’t ask why a run went wrong, and that’s rather the point,” said Senior Lecturer Dr Runa Adegoke, Convenor of the School’s Strategic Drift Survey.
The result folds neatly into the School of Emergent Priorities’ anticipatory-capability agenda, which has spent the past two years asking how long an informal tolerance can run before an institution feels compelled to write it down. A second season is already planned, to separate a handler’s own error from a startled dog’s before the count decides between them.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.67w7gs.