A new prospectus for the School of Continuous Improvement's Master of Applied Measurement and Capability Sprints programmes builds its pitch around a null result the Adaptive Metrics Lab published exactly as found.
A new prospectus turns a nine-week sandwich-board study that found nothing into the case for studying at Slop University.
A new marketing brochure from the School of Continuous Improvement puts a null result on its cover story: nine weeks of hand-counted foot traffic outside forty strip-mall shopfronts, and no relationship at all between a hand-written sandwich-board special and the number of pedestrians who stopped. The University has folded that finding into a fresh prospectus for the Master of Applied Measurement and the Capability Sprints placement programme, rather than setting it aside for a happier result to lead with.
The habit that makes an honest zero publishable is the same habit that makes any other finding worth trusting, and it’s the one thing this brochure is really recruiting for.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
The brochure gathers the Adaptive Metrics Lab’s fieldwork alongside profiles of the programme’s convening staff and a showcase of the School’s recent publications, presenting the null finding as evidence of a research culture that reports what it measures rather than what the measurement was expected to show. “Every cohort brings its own live measurement gap, and this year’s happened to sit outside a row of shopfronts,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement.
The School regards the finding as exactly the kind of result its programmes exist to produce, whichever way it points. The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.3vgrw4.