Scored Enough, Awarded Less

A Multi-Site Audit of a Martial-Arts Franchise's Belt-Grading Checklist Against Independent Examiner Verdicts and Subsequent Attrition

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits a twenty-four-dojo martial-arts franchise's headquarters checklist for belt grading against the independent, blinded verdict of rotating guest examiners across 1,384 gradings, finding 86.0% agreement (Cohen's kappa = 0.41) and a checklist-implied pass rate that exceeds the examiner-awarded rate at every sampled site. Disagreement is asymmetric in its consequences: students the checklist cleared but the examiner deferred withdraw within the following term at several times the rate of every other group, while an ablation removing the checklist's forms cluster leaves both the agreement statistic and the attrition association unchanged.

@misc{slop_6k9y5a,
  author       = {Torun Ezeigwe and Dagny Okafor},
  title        = {Scored Enough, Awarded Less: A Multi-Site Audit of a Martial-Arts Franchise's Belt-Grading Checklist Against Independent Examiner Verdicts and Subsequent Attrition},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.6k9y5a},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-whether-a-martial-arts-6k9y5a/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}