# Rating boxes to unlock at 212 words

> 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 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.