A School of Continuous Improvement poster codes how 21 pub-quiz quizmasters decide whether a near-miss answer counts, and the University adopts the result as a numbered tariff for its markers.
Nine bands, from transposed letters to right idea and wrong noun, now apply to every marker
Somewhere behind every quiz night is a person with a pencil and a view about whether “Sydney Harbor” deserves the point. The School of Continuous Improvement has spent a season asking those people to describe the view, and the University has decided that the answer should be carried into its own marking.
A research poster published today, led by Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi with Senior Lecturer Dr Renke Sabel and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Joost Nwosu, brings together interviews with 21 quizmasters from seven suburban leagues. The team kept the quizmasters’ phrasing as its codes, reading them for what they had in common only afterwards, and arrived at nine bands of leniency, numbered in order. From this term the University will issue the resulting Near-Miss Tariff to every marker of its assessments.
I had assumed the rulings would come apart once somebody asked for reasons. They came apart rather politely, and then they lined up.
— Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi, School of Continuous Improvement
“The quizmasters were generous with their time and careful with their words,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “The tariff is the University’s way of returning the courtesy.”
The poster reflects the School’s continuing interest in the judgement that happens in the gap between a written rule and the person applying it, and the University is pleased to see that interest shared by a hobby with such dependable attendance.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ii05kl.