Currently a Strategic Planning Analyst at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Dr. Sarah Lynch is an assessment, evaluation, and research professional with expertise in educational measurement, institutional effectiveness, and evidence-informed planning. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Psychology and History from St. Thomas University (New Brunswick), a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) specializing in Social Studies and Special Education at the Secondary School Level from the University of New Brunswick, a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies from Carleton University, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology from UBC.

Sarah has experience with a wide range of assessments, including classroom, large-scale, diagnostic, and co-curricular assessments. After completing her M.A. at Carleton University, Sarah joined Paragon Testing Enterprises (now Prometric) in 2012, where she contributed to the development and refinement of content for two of Canada’s leading high-stakes English-language proficiency assessments: the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program (CELPIP) and the Canadian Academic English Language (CAEL) Test. Over an eight-year period, she progressed from item writer to item editor and reviser, assuming increasing responsibility for content quality and standards.

Concurrently, from 2013 to 2016, she worked as an English instructor at the University of Ottawa, where she taught English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses to multilingual students, including international and domestic francophone students. In this role, she helped them develop the English communication skills required for success in their university studies. Her responsibilities also included co-leading assessment initiatives within the EAP program alongside the director of language assessment. This work involved developing test specifications; training and mentoring item writers in best practices for item development, rubric design, and test validity principles; and designing and developing final examinations for multiple EAP courses to measure students’ academic language proficiency.

In 2017, Sarah joined the University of British Columbia, where she designed and taught academic writing courses to international students at UBC’s Vantage College. She collaborated with two colleagues on a curriculum renewal project that reimagined how academic writing is taught to first-year students. This work subsequently led to a published article in TESOL Quarterly, with a book chapter on Systemic Functional Linguistics in tertiary education forthcoming. She later taught an education research methods course in the Faculty of Education, guiding upper-year students through the entire research process, from formulating research questions to data collection, analysis and synthesis, and scholarly communication.

Alongside her roles at UBC, Sarah also worked part-time at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) from 2021 to 2022, where she led psychometric analyses and test development initiatives aimed at strengthening the reliability, validity, and overall quality of BCIT’s diagnostic English-language assessments. These assessments are used to identify students who would benefit from additional language support.

In late 2022, while continuing to teach at UBC, she transitioned into a new role as a Senior Research and Planning Analyst, contributing to institutional research and planning through advanced quantitative and psychometric analyses. Her work generated evidence to support strategic decision-making by senior university leadership.

Since June 2024, Sarah has served as a Strategic Planning Analyst within the Vice-President, Students portfolio, where she leads the design and implementation of a division-wide assessment framework for one of UBC’s largest student-facing portfolios. In this capacity, she translates strategic priorities into measurable outcomes across programs and services that collectively shape the student experience. She also partners with program and service teams to design and implement assessments, providing hands-on coaching and consultation throughout the assessment cycle, from outcome articulation to the interpretation and application of findings.

Sarah brings a critical perspective to large-scale online assessment, recognizing its potential for increased efficiency, accessibility, and the speed with which results and insights are generated. At the same time, she emphasizes that assessment designers must have a thorough understanding of their testing populations to determine whether alternative delivery modes or accommodations are required to ensure fairness and validity. She is also attentive to the growing role of AI in assessment, carefully weighing its potential benefits and efficiencies against ethical considerations and concerns related to public trust. Although her expertise is grounded primarily in large-scale language assessment and tertiary-level institutional assessment rather than K-12, she is well acquainted with the influence of platforms like Vretta in shaping assessment practice across Canada and internationally.

Sarah is particularly proud of her doctoral research, which sits at the unique intersection of linguistics and psychometrics. Her dissertation examined syntactic complexity in psychological test items and its associations with item responses across linguistically diverse populations, integrating psychometric modelling with corpus-based linguistic analysis to build validity evidence. This research was subsequently published in the International Journal of Testing, and her dissertation can be accessed here: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0448445.

Sarah’s work to date has provided her a strong foundation in validity and threats to validity in educational and psychological tests, grammatical complexity in psychological test items, and mode effects between paper- and computer-based tests. She is particularly drawn to coaching and consulting work related to test development, including item development, item analysis, standard setting, and gathering validity evidence, as well as survey design, diagnostic assessment, and assessment framework development.

Away from her professional responsibilities, Sarah enjoys the outdoors, travelling internationally, and spending time with friends and family, including her Miniature Schnauzer.