Frederic Mather Lord (November 12, 1912 – February 5, 2000) was a psychometrician for

Educational Testing Service Educational Testing Service (ETS), founded in 1947, is the world's largest private nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization. It is headquartered in Lawrence Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, Lawrence Township, New Jersey, b ...

. The

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and scoring have changed several times; originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, it was later called the Schol ...

GRE The Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) is a standardized test that is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools in the United States and Canada and a few other countries. The GRE is owned and administered by Educational Testing Servi ...

GMAT The Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT ( ())) is a computer adaptive test (CAT) intended to assess certain analytical, writing, quantitative, verbal, and reading skills in written English for use in admission to a graduate management ...

LSAT The Law School Admission Test (LSAT; ) is a standardized test administered by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) for prospective law school candidates. It is designed to assess reading comprehension as well as logical and verbal rea ...

and

TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL ) is a standardized test to measure the English language ability of non-native speakers wishing to enroll in English-speaking universities. The test is accepted by more than 11,000 universities a ...

are all based on Lord's research.

Early life

Lord was born on November 12, 1912 in Hanover, New Hampshire. His great-great-grandfather,

Nathan Lord Nathan or Natan may refer to: People *Nathan (given name), including a list of people and characters with this name *Nathan (surname) *Nathan (prophet), a person in the Hebrew Bible * Nathan (son of David), biblical figure, son of King David an ...

, served as the sixth president of

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

, from which Lord graduated with a bachelor's degree in Sociology in 1936. He later earned a master's degree in Educational Psychology from the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

, followed by a PhD in Psychology from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1951.

Career

Lord first worked for the Carnegie Foundation in 1944. By 1950, he began working for the

(ETS). He was the source of much of the seminal research on

item response theory In psychometrics, item response theory (IRT) (also known as latent trait theory, strong true score theory, or modern mental test theory) is a paradigm for the design, analysis, and scoring of tests, questionnaires, and similar instruments measuring ...

, including two important books: ''Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores'' (1968, with Melvin R. Novick, and two chapters by

Allan Birnbaum Allan Birnbaum (May 27, 1923 – July 1, 1976) was an American statistician who contributed to statistical inference, foundations of statistics, statistical genetics, statistical psychology, and history of statistics. Life and career Birnbaum w ...

), and ''Applications of Item Response Theory to Practical Testing Problems'' (1980). Lord's research shaped the

and the

. Lord was called the "Father of Modern Testing" by the National Council on Measurement in Education.

Personal life and death

Lord was married twice. He had three sons with his first wife. His second wife was Muriel Kendall. Lord died on February 5, 2000 in Naples, Florida, at 87.

References

1912 births 2000 deaths People from Hanover, New Hampshire Dartmouth College alumni University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development alumni Princeton University alumni 20th-century American mathematicians Psychometricians Fellows of the American Statistical Association {{US-statistician-stub