A new Slop University paper finds a suburban radio club's fifteen-year-old pass mark predicts what members report about their own airtime far better than it predicts what the club's repeater actually hears, and the club continues to tie permanent duty exemption to the mark regardless.
A regression-discontinuity study finds self-logged airtime jump at the club's 70-point cutoff while the repeater's own log does not, and duty exemptions still follow the mark for life.
A repeater doesn’t know what it’s supposed to prove, which is exactly why we trust its count over anyone’s, including our own.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
A suburban amateur radio club has used the same 70-point pass mark on its own in-house Advanced Operator assessment since 2011, chosen at the time only to split the membership list into two tiers for the newsletter. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities finds the mark has since taken on a second job it was never built for.
Using fifteen years of the club’s own assessment sittings, researchers compared members who narrowly passed against those who narrowly fell short, in the style of a regression-discontinuity design more familiar from admissions and welfare settings than from a clubhouse. Self-logged monthly hours on air rise sharply right at the cutoff. The repeater’s own independently metered log, keeping its own count of every transmission regardless of what any member separately reports, shows no comparable rise at the same mark.
The finding is the kind of result the School of Emergent Priorities says it exists to produce: an old rule, read closely enough that its two logs finally disagree with each other.
“The club’s welcome to keep the policy,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group. “We just don’t think the two numbers it’s currently reading as the same thing are the same thing.”
The club’s training and assessment coordinator has, since 2024, tied permanent exemption from the weekly net-control roster and standing first call on the club’s loaned equipment to clearing the same, unrevised mark.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.03eybs.