American writer of the SATs (US) and GREs - Writing tutor with Susan

Sue tutored each of my children, Priscilla and Grayson, as they were studying for college and graduate school admissions in American colleges. These tests include the PSAT, the SAT and the GMAT.

I worked with Sue Chamberlain for nine years at Educational Testing Service, where she worked on a variety of tests, mostly the SAT and the GRE. I was her content lead on some of these tests, including the PRAXIS test, and her colleague on others. We also had joint responsibility for training educators in California on instructing students for the CAASPP, California’s Common Core test.

Test developers tend to be hired for their intellectual rather than social skills, which means that a lot of excellent test developers are not very good at training or talking to the public. Sue was able to do both well, which made her a valuable asset to the team. Her ability to provide simple explanations of complex subjects resulted in her being assigned the responsibility for training new SAT and GRE test developers, scoring leaders in constructed response scoring, and outside clients such as the California educators. Her social science and math background also made her unique in our ELA department; when the new SAT required test developers to develop science and social science passages as well as the literature passages we’d been used to, Sue ended up writing a high percentage of the science and social science passages, particularly those with graphs.

Her expertise led ETS to form a special relationship with Sue when she moved to the UK, because ETS does not employ UK residents. They instead created a full-time consultant role for Sue, making her the only test developer working in the UK. Unfortunately, this arrangement came to an end in the pandemic when all consulting relationships of any kind were terminated.
We miss Sue terribly and I recommend her strongly for any kind of tutoring --- her intelligence, versatility, and cheerfulness make her a joy to work with.

If you have any questions or require additional information, please feel free to contact me. You can email me at elizacorc115@gmail.com or telephone me at 201-693-2754.

Best regards,

Liz Corcoran