Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher education when race and ethnicity data are plagued by missing values. Students who decline to ethnoracially self-identify become part of a "race unknown" reporting category. In undergraduate enrollment, "race unknown" students are not…

In many educational settings, students may have an incentive to take courses where high grades are easier to achieve, potentially corroding student learning, evaluation of student achievement, and the fairness and efficiency of post-graduation labor outcomes. A grading system that takes into account heterogeneity of teacher standards and student…

Purpose: Prospective students of law are required to demonstrate competence in certain disciplines to attain admission to law school. The grounding in the disciplines is expected to demonstrate competencies required to excel academically in law school. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relevance of the law school admission test to…

The Law School Admission Council recently reported that applications were heading toward a 30-year low, reflecting, as a "New York Times" article put it, "increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt, and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation." Since 2004 the number of law-school…

Standardized tests have been increasingly controversial over recent years in high-stakes admission decisions. Their role in operationalizing definitions of merit and qualification is especially contested, but in law schools this challenge has become particularly intense. Law schools have relied on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and an INDEX…

In measurement research, data simulations are a commonly used analytical technique. While simulation designs have many benefits, it is unclear if these artificially generated datasets are able to accurately capture real examinee item response behaviors. This potential lack of comparability may have important implications for administration of…

The simplified version of the Dorans and Holland (2000) measure of population invariance, the root mean square difference (RMSD), is used to explore the degree of dependence of linking functions on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) subpopulations defined by examinees' gender, ethnic background, geographic region, law school application status,…

Response times on items can be used to improve item selection in adaptive testing provided that a probabilistic model for their distribution is available. In this research, the author used a hierarchical modeling framework with separate first-level models for the responses and response times and a second-level model for the distribution of the…

Two conditional versions of the exposure-control method with item-ineligibility constraints for adaptive testing in van der Linden and Veldkamp (2004) are presented. The first version is for unconstrained item selection, the second for item selection with content constraints imposed by the shadow-test approach. In both versions, the exposure rates…

After the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the University of Michigan admission cases, which struck down racial preferences and quotas in Michigan's undergraduate and law school admission, several groups have challenged race-conscious admission, school placement policies and academic support programs. Even the federal government has challenged…

In test assembly, a fundamental difference exists between algorithms that select a test sequentially or simultaneously. Sequential assembly allows us to optimize an objective function at the examinee's ability estimate, such as the test information function in computerized adaptive testing. But it leads to the non-trivial problem of how to realize…

A study was conducted to examine patterns of test preparation for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) during the 1990-1991 testing year. This represented an extension of an earlier study that examined self-report test preparation methods for the June and October 1989 test administrations. In this study, five types of analysis were performed: (1)…

The fair and accurate treatment of multiple test scores for law school applicants who take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) more than one time is the focus of this study. The study reexamines the differential validity and predictive accuracy of the different test scores that are presented by repeat test takers. The study includes U.S. law…

Speededness refers to the extent to which time limits affect test takers' performance. With regard to the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), speededness is currently measured by calculating the proportion of test takers who do not reach each item on the test. These proportions typically increase slightly toward the end of the test, indicating that…

Advocates for a more inclusive legal profession are worried about the recent decline in enrollment of Black students in law school. According to the American Bar Association (ABA), Blacks were 7.4 percent of all law students in 1994. By 2005, that percentage had fallen to just 6.6. Several law journal articles have suggested that the schools…