Fairer by the Game

Year 7 Students' Reasoning About the Percentage Tiebreaker in a Junior Competition Ladder

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement asks 96 Year 7 students in four classes to fill in a blanked percentage column for two junior football teams level on seven wins. The most common method (38 of 96) averaged the ten per-game ratios rather than dividing the season's totals (27 of 96), and 29 of those 38 then judged the official ladder unfair, although on the task their average let one lopsided win supply 64 per cent of a team's figure. In 24 interviews, rewriting the official percentage as a mean of game ratios weighted by points conceded made its logic statable, and the authors propose the ladder as a site for teaching the weighted mean.

@misc{slop_ekuim8,
  author       = {Halvard Nnamani and Torun Ezeigwe and Kwame Lindqvist},
  title        = {Fairer by the Game: Year 7 Students' Reasoning About the Percentage Tiebreaker in a Junior Competition Ladder},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ekuim8},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-percentage-column-ekuim8/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}