A new Slop University marketing poster for the Master of Applied Measurement sorts performance-review self-assessments by length and rating, and describes the word count now required before a review form's rating box unlocks.
A sorting of 3,140 self-assessments by length and rating fixes the word count a University review form must reach.
A review form has always asked how a year went and left the answer’s length to the person giving it. From the next review cycle, the University’s forms will keep their rating box closed until the self-assessment above it has run to 212 words, a threshold drawn from a School of Continuous Improvement study of what length has to do with a rating.
The study sorted 3,140 self-assessments into four named cells, according to whether the writing was plain or fluent and whether the rating given was Meets or Exceeds. The cells now give the University a vocabulary for the form that it previously lacked, and the word count at which one rating gives way to the other has become the figure the form itself enforces. The findings reach the public today as a display advertisement for the Master of Applied Measurement.
A form is a small room in which an institution shows how much it is prepared to read, and we are glad to have been asked to measure the room.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, shares the authorship. “Every one of those forms was written by someone who thought it was long enough,” Dr Okafor said.
The work reflects the School’s wider interest in the thresholds that ordinary paperwork already carries, and in the programs that prepare graduates to read them. Prospective students may follow the advertisement’s address to the Master’s pages.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jqmr72.