A new Slop University paper finds that Capability Sprint graduates' bed-making habit, long reported as a single average, actually splits the population into two groups with almost nobody between them, and the program is replacing the average with a pass/fail standard.
A survey of 400 Capability Sprint graduates finds two groups, not one steady average, and the program retires the number that missed them
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent eighteen months asking Capability Sprint graduates a single question about their mornings, and the answer has just cost the program its favourite number.
NEST, the survey instrument behind the finding, asked 400 graduates of the School’s Capability Sprints program how many mornings a week they now make their bed, eighteen months after their certificate. The pooled answer, a respectable 4.4 mornings out of seven, is the figure the program has reported for as long as it has reported one. Examined in full rather than averaged, the same answers split into two distinct groups: more than half of graduates make the bed nearly every morning, roughly a third have stopped altogether, and almost nobody sits anywhere between the two.
On the strength of the finding, the program is retiring the average. Graduates will now be scored against a pass/fail standard, with anyone reporting fewer than six mornings a week reclassified as not having retained the habit and required to repeat the relevant module, the outcome published each term.
An average is a promise that the typical case exists somewhere in the middle. Ours didn’t.
— Lecturer Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Convenor of Capability Sprints
Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, welcomed the finding as “exactly the kind of number that looks fine right up until you ask what it’s made of.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dos2wf.