The Buros Center for Testing in collaboration with Educational Testing Service is hosting the ninth installment of the annual Buros/ETS lecture series at 2 p.m. Sept. 1.
The event is free and open to the public and will be held in Teachers College Hall, Room 112, followed immediately by a reception in the Buros library.
The lecture series takes place once a year and brings a senior research scientist from Educational Testing Service to the UNL campus to speak on current assessment and testing issues. This year, Rebecca Zwick will be coming to Lincoln to give a presentation titled “Crafting A College Class: An Exploration of Methods Based on Test Scores, Grades, Noncognitive Factors, Affirmative Action, and More.”
Zwick will discuss her research on college admissions processes. What methods are best for selecting a diverse and academically well-prepared entering class? Her analyses are based on data from the Education Longitudinal Study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics.
In addition to selection methods that involve ranking applicants, she will discuss lotteries as well as a method based on constrained optimization that allows academic credentials to be maximized while constraining the composition of the entering class.
Zwick is a distinguished presidential appointee in the Statistical Analysis, Data Analysis, and Psychometric Research area at Educational Testing Service. She previously was a member of the Division of Statistic and Psychometrics at ETS, and she has served on the National Academy of Sciences Board on Testing and Assessment, technical advisory groups for the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Programme in International Student Assessment, and the Board of Directors for National Council for Measurement in Education.
She is the author of more than 100 publications in educational measurement and statistics and education policy and received the NCME Award for Outstanding Dissemination of Educational Measurement Concepts to the Public for her publications on standards and high-stakes testing.
Currently, she is conducting research on differential item functioning and working on a book on college admissions to be published by Harvard University Press.
