A School of Emergent Priorities research poster reports no measurable effect from an agentic priority scheduler trialled across three multi-faith quiet rooms, and the mandatory booking protocol the University is adopting despite the null finding.
A 14-week trial across three quiet rooms found no effect on wait time, complaints, or bump rate; the Office of Campus Life made the scheduler mandatory regardless.
The multi-faith quiet room has always run on the coordinator’s own judgement — who has waited longest, whose need reads most urgent, who yields the slot to whom. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities asks whether replacing that judgement with an agentic scheduler changes any of it. Across a full teaching term, it did not.
Dr Ronja Oyelaran, working with Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Anouk Mensah, layered a ridge-regression priority scheduler over the existing manual queue at three of the University’s multi-faith and reflection rooms, logging 1,742 booking requests over fourteen weeks while the rooms’ coordinators kept the standing power to override any ranking by hand. Wait time, complaint volume, and bump rate were pre-registered and held fixed as the trial’s outcomes; none moved beyond baseline noise, and the scheduler’s own ranking matched the coordinator’s prior ordering on 94% of contested slots.
What the trial mostly confirmed is how much of the coordinator’s own ordering was already the right answer — which is a different finding from the one the scheduler was commissioned to produce.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The Office of Campus Life describes the change as part of a broader effort to make every scheduling judgement, however minor, accountable to a documented rule; from Term 3 it has made the scheduler the sole permitted booking method for every multi-faith and reflection space on campus, with coordinator override logged but no longer subject to routine review. Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Convenor of the Demo Quarter, welcomed the trial as “exactly the kind of instrumented small system the showcase looks for,” regardless of what it found.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ogrqjf.