A Slop University research poster scores 118 table-tennis club members on match win-rate and volunteer stewarding hours, and reports a peak-time table roster now drawn entirely from the resulting PACE standing.
Scoring match win-rate against volunteer stewarding hours, a new PACE grid has replaced memory and turn-taking as how one table-tennis club fills its 7pm tables.
A suburban table-tennis club’s peak-time ladder used to fill by memory and turn-taking. A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement gives the club a grid instead, scoring every member on how they play and how often they help run the night.
Joost Nwosu and Tove Ilesanmi worked from a season of match-card returns and the front-desk sign-in sheet, crossing each member’s win-rate against their stewarding hours at the quarter’s own median to sort all 118 graded players into four standing categories. The two measures, the poster reports, move almost independently of each other: a strong season on the table buys no credit toward a weak one at the sign-in desk, and the reverse holds too.
Win-rate tells you how someone plays on a Tuesday. Stewarding hours tell you whether the club still exists by Thursday. We didn’t think either one should get to outvote the other.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The grading committee has adopted the resulting PACE standing as the sole basis for drawing the peak-time roster: the top band now holds a table every session, the bottom band sits out until its next regrade, and no appeal runs between cycles. “The threshold used to be tacit — whoever showed up enough got remembered,” said Tove Ilesanmi, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities. “Writing it into four cells doesn’t make it less tacit. It just makes it look finished.”
The School of Continuous Improvement counts the result as a small, clean instance of a problem it works at every scale: two things worth measuring, and no established way to say which one should win when they disagree. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vnrs71.