The NCME and measurement community joins colleagues across the world in mourning the passing of Neil J. Dorans, a Distinguished Presidential Appointee and long-time research scientist at ETS. Over a career spanning decades, Neil combined exceptional technical rigor with a steadfast commitment to fairness in testing, leaving an enduring imprint on the theory and practice of educational measurement.
Neil’s scholarship advanced many areas central to NCME’s mission, including score linking and equating, scale interpretation, and the re-centering of SAT scales. His careful work on the implications of scale changes for score distributions and policy remain a key point of reference for understanding how technical decisions affect the meaning and use of test scores. He also made foundational contributions to concordances between SAT and ACT scores, providing institutions with sound methodologies to compare results across different assessments.
A defining thread in Neil’s career was his focus on fairness. He pioneered approaches for evaluating differential item functioning, differential prediction, and score equity, shaping how fairness is assessed at the item, test, and system levels. Beyond methodological innovation, Neil championed the principle that fairness must be embedded in measurement design, scaling, linking, and interpretation—a philosophy that continues to influence the measurement field.
Neil’s impact was recognized with the NCME Career Contributions Award and the ATP Career Achievement Award, honors that reflect both the technical depth of his scholarship and its broad influence on practice. He will be remembered not only for his groundbreaking research, but also for his generosity as a colleague, mentor, and trusted voice in the NCME community and the broader measurement profession.