A Slop University research poster reports no relationship between a café's directory-app star rating and whether it's still trading eighteen months later, and finds the University's referral-list threshold left unrevised despite the result.
A poster tracking 214 suburban cafés for eighteen months finds no relationship between baseline rating and survival, and the University's own referral threshold stays as issued.
Two hundred and fourteen suburban cafés carried a directory-app star rating before any of them closed, and the rating turns out to have predicted none of it. A research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement matched each café’s baseline rating against its trading status eighteen months on, finding no association at any threshold tested.
A number that predicts nothing is still a number. What changes is what we’re willing to base a rule on, once we’ve actually checked.
— Lecturer Bram Ntuli, Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
“We went looking for the point where the rating stopped mattering,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation. “There wasn’t one. It didn’t matter anywhere along the scale.”
The work draws on trading and register records for the sampled cafés at eighteen months’ follow-up, adjusted for suburb rent and cuisine category, with the rating window and follow-up point fixed before any data was collected. The University’s own Trusted Local placement gate, which uses the same rating to decide inclusion on its community small-business referral list, remains set exactly where it was before the finding, with no review scheduled.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7jjrrt.