The GRATED rubric rates painted fish stencils beside stormwater grates on tone, edge and definition, and a new Slop University poster reports that the score and the litter beneath it are unrelated.
A three-part rubric for painted drain stencils, tested across nine wards, finds no relationship between a stencil's score and the litter below it.
Every shire keeps a fish painted beside its stormwater grates, and few keep any record of how well the fish is holding up. GRATED, a new rating instrument from Slop University’s School of Continuous Improvement, gives each one a score.
The research poster describes a rubric applied to 612 stencils across nine wards, with each stencil rated on tone, edge and definition and the paint crew’s schedule set from the result. It reports plainly that the score, and the repainting that followed it, bore no relationship to the litter recovered from the pits below.
A rubric is asked only to describe what it sees, and this one has now described every fish in the shire.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
The method turns a fortnightly sweep, a standard photograph and three independent raters into a single number per stencil, which the shire’s maintenance schedule then carries forward unchanged. Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, describes the work as “a careful record of the drains as they were found”.
The University is proud to see a null result placed on the record in the terms in which it arrived. The cut-off stands as set, and the repainting schedule follows the score alone.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xfleu3.