ABSTRACT
The late William Angoff could hardly have realized how influential an obscure footnote in his seminal chapter on standard setting in the 1971 edition of Educational Measurement would become over the next 30 years. The unintentional effect of that footnote (L.R.Tucker, personal communication, 1952) has been immeasurable:
And thus, the Angoff method for standard setting was born. From 1971 through the late 1980s, the Angoff method (or variations
dubbed “modified Angoff”) was one of a handful of methods that agencies used to set student performance standards or to develop standards for
certification and licensure examinations (Berk, 1986; Jaeger, 1989; Livingston & Zieky, 1982, Zieky, 1994). The popularity of the Angoff method was due in large measure to the ease of implementation and the direct estimation of the standards based on ratings of the items appearing on the test. Participants could easily be trained to make such judgments about items; empirical data were not required. The method could be explained easily and understood by those outside the process, such as policymakers. The cutscores could be computed by a calculator; a computer was not required.
