A new Slop University brochure showcases eight findings the University has rerun, reread, or tested against a second site, anchored by a second-site rerun of the tea-room biscuit certification standard.
The four-kind taxonomy holds twice on three counts, and every certified common room now carries a live score that decides whether it keeps its listing
Slop University has published a new showcase of research it has already gone back to check — the closest thing the institution has to a house style, and, its authors argue, the reason a Slop University finding is worth more than the paper it’s printed on. The brochure, “Does It Hold Up Twice?”, gathers eight published findings from the Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement that have been rerun, reread, or tested against a second site.
At the centre of the collection is a rerun of the School of Continuous Improvement’s four-kind biscuit certification standard, first published earlier this year. A second common room, run by a different team, held the standard for three of its four categories; the fourth, a catch-all restocking category, came apart in a new way at the new site. Facilities has responded by attaching a live agreement score to every certified common room’s tin, with a listing withdrawn automatically after two consecutive audits below standard.
A tin either matches the panel’s last call or it doesn’t. What the second site gave us was somewhere honest to find out.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
The brochure also revisits the University’s celebrated coffee-cart queue-length indicator, which did not survive a second, independently instrumented queue, and a regression-discontinuity study that separated a courtyard’s pigeons from the coffee cart they were assumed to be following. Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, who directs the Master of Priority Studies and led the collection, said the pattern across the eight findings is less about which ones held than about what happens once a school decides to look.
“A published finding here is an invitation to whoever reads it next,” Lindqvist said. “Some of ours have taken that invitation and come back with a different answer, and we would rather have that on the record than not.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2jxu8h.