Embedded Standard Setting (ESS; Lewis & Cook, 2020) transforms standard setting from a standalone workshop to an active part of the assessment development lifecycle. ESS purports to lower costs by eliminating the standard-setting workshop and enhance the validity argument by maintaining a consistent focus on the evidentiary relationship…

Standard setting is the process of identifying the point(s) on a scale that serve to differentiate between individuals of distinct proficiency levels. While standard setting is ultimately a policy decision, most of the process is carried out by subject matter experts who are tasked with reconciling item-level or examinee-level information (e.g.…

Changes to the American Board of Internal Medicine's Maintenance of Certification Program: Preserving Core Assessment Values As Maintenance of Certification (MoC) for practicing physicians has evolved into more continuous programs, controversy has arisen over how physicians should self-regulate their profession and serve the public trust in doing…

In this paper we describe content focused, practical procedures to establish benchmarked performance standards for educational and other tests. To implement our procedures, we identify one or more external benchmark (e.g., NAEP or PISA performance levels, college and career readiness benchmarks); link to the external benchmarks to locate those…