Calibration

Your group's calibration meeting on the Assessment 2 packets, and the one page afterwards that explains the result using only what the room did.

Due: 20 May 2027 · Weight: 15%

The brief#

Sit in the room. Argue for your engineer. Then explain what the room did, using only what the room did.

Timeline#

• Wednesday 19 May, midnight. Your prediction, 100 words, in the Assessment 3 thread: who in your group’s set of engineers you expect to land in exceeds and who in below, and why. The reasons may only be about the room (who speaks first, whose case has a number in its first line, whose name the chair knows) and not about the packets. The chair for your room is drawn the same evening and announced in the thread.
• Thursday 20 May, 2 pm. The room. Forty-five minutes.
• Thursday 20 May, midnight. The page.

The room#

Your group is the room. It is the size it is, because teams are; what stays fixed is the curve.

• The curve is one in five exceeds and one in ten below, rounded to the nearest whole person, with at least one below. A room of six is one, four, one. A room of eight is two, five, one. A room of twelve is two, nine, one. The chair announces the numbers at the start.
• The chair is one of you, drawn on Wednesday night. The chair does not argue. The chair calls names in an order of their choosing, which they do not explain, times each case at two minutes and stops it, writes the proposals on the board, runs the ten minutes that fit them to the curve, and fills in the record sheet.
• The chair’s engineer has nobody to speak for them; their manager left in the reorg. The chair reads that packet’s numbers and the old manager’s notes aloud, flat, in one minute, and the room rates them like everyone else. Every room has one of these.
• Each case is two minutes, from page one of your Assessment 2. Read it. The chair stops you at two whether or not you are finished.
• Fitting the curve takes ten minutes. The chair counts how many exceeds are over and how many below are short, and the room argues who moves. The chair decides ties. When the chair says the ratings are fixed, they are fixed.
• The record sheet is one page: the order names were called, the seconds each case ran, the proposal for each, every move during the ten minutes and who proposed it, and the final ratings. The tutor walks between rooms, arbitrates anything the chair asks about, and signs the sheet at the end. It is photographed and posted to the group before 5 pm.
• If someone is absent, the chair reads their engineer’s packet the same way as their own. The absent student has failed the gate unless the policies page’s extension rule applies.

If the stand-up is shorter than fifty minutes, or the room is larger than twelve, the tutor cuts cases to ninety seconds and says so before the first name is called.

The gate#

Arguing your case in the room, or chairing it and keeping the record, is pass or fail. A pass opens the mark. A fail caps the piece at 49 whatever the page says. Nothing about how well you argued is marked, and neither is where your engineer ended up.

What to write#

One page, under 500 words, four sections with these headings.

1. The record. What happened, in order, in a form that agrees with the chair’s sheet: who was called when, what was proposed, what moved. Short. This is the part a marker checks line by line against the sheet.
2. The mechanisms. At least three explanations of why the ratings landed where they did. Each one points at an entry in the record and at the week of this course that says why that entry mattered. The rule of the page: no explanation may refer to the quality of any packet. If the room gave Hannah a below, you may write that her case was read eleventh and ran out of time; you may not write that her case was weak.
3. The prediction and the gap. Quote your Wednesday prediction. State what happened. Explain the difference, or, if there was none, explain which mechanism you relied on and why it held. A right prediction with no explanation scores as a wrong one.
4. The counterfactual. One change in the room, and only the room, that would have moved the below to a different engineer. A different calling order, a case that started with a number, a name the chair had heard before. Say why it would have worked, by week.

Why the two minutes are not marked#

It would be the most rater-dependent mark in the course. Week 1 told you how much of a rating is the rater. A course that then graded your performance in a room on the tutor’s impression of it would be the thing it describes. The page can be marked against a sheet and a rubric. The room cannot, so it is not.

What you submit#

The prediction in the thread. Your two minutes, or your chairing, in the room. Then one PDF, one page, named SLOP3385-<uid>-calibration.pdf, in the Assessment 3 thread. This assessment is the course’s own system applied to work you were handed by lottery; the policies page has said so since week 1.

Marker’s checklist#

1. Was there a prediction in the thread before the room, and does it talk about the room rather than the packets?
2. Was the student in the room, arguing or chairing? If not, cap at 49.
3. Does the record match the chair’s sheet, entry for entry?
4. Are there three mechanisms, each tied to an entry and a week, and is any of them an argument about a packet’s quality?
5. Does the gap section explain, or only report?
6. Is the counterfactual a change in the room, and would it move the below?