Maintaining score interchangeability and scale consistency is crucial for any testing programs that administer multiple forms across years. The use of a multiple linking design, which involves equating a new form to multiple old forms and averaging the conversions, has been proposed to control scale drift. However, the use of multiple linking…

A quantitative method, meta-analysis, is used to integrate research findings from a representative group of 38 coaching studies. Because different studies reported results on different scales, effect size was used to transform all results to a common metric. This meta-analysis showed that there are two distinct literatures on the effectiveness of…

The role of standardized tests in American education is being challenged as many feel that they are unfair and actually reinforce and legitimize existing inequalities. The Educational Testing Service, the SAT, meritocracy, test coaching, and economic bias are discussed. (MLW)

The feasibility of pre-equating, or establishing conversions from raw to scaled scores through the use of pretest data before operationally administering a test, was investigated for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Item-response theory based equating methods were used to estimate item parameters on SAT pretest data, instead of using final form…