Randy Bennett is the speaker for the eighth annual Buros Center for Testing and Educational Testing Service lecture series on 9:30 a.m. Sept. 5. The event is free and open to the public and will be held in the Teachers College Hall, Room 250, followed by a reception at 11 a.m. in the Buros library.

The annual lecture series brings a senior research scientist from Educational Testing Service to the UNL campus to speak on current assessment and testing issues. This year, Bennett will give a presentation titled “Validity and Automated Essay Scoring: How Validation Can Go Wrong.”

The Hewlett Foundation’s Automated Student Assessment Prize competition found that machines were able to grade essays as well as, perhaps better than, human raters. But was that conclusion justifiable, either in principle or empirically? Bennett’s lecture will offer seven assertions about validity and automated essay scoring, using the Automated Student Assessment Prize competition to illustrate how validation can go badly wrong.

Bennett is Norman O. Frederiksen Chair in Assessment Innovation at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. Since the 1980s, he has conducted research on integrating advances in the cognitive and learning sciences, technology, and measurement to create new approaches to assessment.