College rankings create much talk and discussion in the higher education arena. This love/hate relationship has not necessarily resulted in better rankings, but rather, more rankings. This paper looks at some of the measures and pitfalls of the current rankings systems, and proposes areas for improvement through a better focus on teaching and…

Psychometricians continue to introduce new approaches to setting cut scores for educational assessments in an attempt to improve on current methods. In this paper we describe the Item-Descriptor (ID) Matching method, a method based on IRT item mapping. In ID Matching, test content area experts match items (i.e., their judgments about the knowledge…

This study is the National Board of Medical Examiners exploration of content-based techniques (standard-setting techniques in which pass/fail decisions are based upon the performance of examinees in relation to test content). Two content-based techniques (Angoff and Ebel) and three methods of evaluating examinee performance were studied. (MLW)