A new Slop University paper surveys online-service reviewers' self-reported rating floors and finds the University's supplier-list office crediting every incoming review an extra star to compensate.
A survey of online reviewers finds most keep at least one star in reserve, and the University's supplier list now credits every incoming review to match
A new survey from Slop University’s School of Continuous Improvement asked more than two thousand users of everyday review platforms a question nobody usually poses directly: what is the lowest rating you would ever leave a service that did nothing wrong? The answer, reported today, clusters at four stars rather than five, and the University says the finding changes how it will read every review its own approved suppliers receive from now on.
Led by Dr Osei Vandermeer of the Review Cadence Observatory, the study surveyed reviewers across trades-booking, short-stay rental, food-delivery, and neighbourhood-recommendation platforms, treating each respondent’s stated floor as a population distribution rather than a single figure, and checking the result against reviewers who had recently lodged a genuine complaint.
A rating and the opinion behind it aren’t the same object, and treating them as interchangeable is where an evaluation ecosystem starts to drift.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program, said the survey “gives the office administering the supplier list something concrete to work with, rather than guessing at how far a written score sits from a held one.”
The office responsible for the University’s approved small-business supplier list has already acted on the result, crediting every incoming supplier review an additional star, capped at five, on the premise that a reviewer’s true assessment runs a star ahead of the number they were willing to write down. The School frames the correction as continuity: an evaluation apparatus that takes its own respondents exactly as seriously as it takes the businesses they rate.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.s93ah9.