This paper examines why Americans are so preoccupied with the "U.S. News and World Report" ("USNWR") annual rankings of colleges and universities and why higher education institutions have become equally preoccupied with them. It discusses the rankings categories (academic reputation, student selectivity, faculty resources,…

This paper demonstrates that the various College Board examinations, most importantly the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs), make predictions of grade point averages at the University of California at Berkeley that are biased against women. This finding persists even when one has made corrections for differences in fields that women and men study…

Research efforts have established that the Mantel-Haenszel procedure (MHP) is an effective method for detecting the presence of test items exhibiting differential item functioning (DIF). While the MHP has been advocated for situations where item response theory based methods may not be usable, recent findings have suggested that the performance of…