Emerita professor Dr. Rebecca Zwick has published a new book Who Gets In? Strategies for Fair and Effective College Admissions (Harvard University Press, 2017), which examines the widely debated current state of college admissions and tackles the possibility of making the process fairer. In the book, Zwick uses survey data to analyze the intense competition within the college application process in the U.S. Interestingly, Zwick concludes from looking at a wide variety of parameters that there is no truly objective way to evaluate admissions systems and therefore proposes that schools should use whatever admissions criteria they find fitting to their educational policy.
“Who Gets In? is an excellent primer for people involved in the admissions process, and for those who would like to create a fairer way of assessing students,” writes UCLA Professor in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies Patricia Gándara. “Zwick does a wonderful job of making complex assessment issues clear and accessible to a general audience. I loved this book.”
Dr. Zwick is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Education, where she worked from 1996 to 2010. Zwick received a doctorate in quantitative methods in education at the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. in Statistics from Rutgers University. After completing her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral fellow at the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then spent 12 years as a researcher at Educational Testing Service in Princeton. After joining the department in 1996, she developed and taught courses in educational statistics and psychometrics. She also led the emphasis in research methodology. Zwick completed a National Science Foundation project in which her research team developed and evaluated instructional materials to help educators to better interpret standardized test results. She also explored the effect of high school quality on the predictive validity of SAT scores and high school grade-point average. Zwick served on technical advisory committees for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Programme in International Student Assessment (PISA), and the SAT.