Brian French has been appointed as the chair of GRE Programs’ Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) for the next three years.
As chair, French will lead TAC in carrying out its duties, serve as a member of the GRE Research Committee, and provide a TAC update at the GRE board meetings.
TAC’s primary responsibility is to provide significant input to the research agenda for the GRE Program. It is focused on providing technical and psychometric support for the program. The program works to ensure the technical quality of both the final GRE research reports and new GRE proposals before they go to the GRE Research Committee. The TAC consists of professors who represent various technical expertise in measurement and higher education.
“The work within the TAC is a great model for our graduate students to begin to gain insight of how their training, in both applied and methodological issues in psychological and educational measurement, can have influence on a large scale,” French said.
French said he is looking forward to developing relationships with partners outside of academia. Several of his previous students have completed internships with Educational Testing Service (ETS), the organization that administers the GRE. These internships helped lead to employment for these following graduation. One of these students is Mo Zhang, a research scientist at ETS, who was French’s prior student. Zhang had won the national Bradley Hanson Award for making a substantive contribution to the field of educational measurement.
“This is the type of impact we want our graduates to have in their field and reflects the success that we want to support the scholar lifecycle of our students,” French said. “This trajectory begins with graduate admissions programs.”
French’s goal is to move forward and continue to build a strong working connection between the GRE program groups. He says that it is not just accuracy in graduate admissions, but also outcome assessments in relation to ETS’s tests, while continuing to focus on supporting student success throughout the graduate student lifecycle.
“It is an honor to work with the GRE TAC to advise the technical aspects of the program and the research agenda;” French said. “This role allows me to bring student and faculty voices into a large testing program to maintain focus on the individual for which we make decisions.”
