Examinations Institute committee members

Following selection and approval of the committee members by the Examinations Institute director, the committee begins work on the lengthy process of writing the examination. Typically, the physical chemistry committee meets at the site of each ACS national meeting until work on the examination is completed. Some of the other examination committees may meet at the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education or the ChemEd conference. At the first committee meeting, the committee will typically discuss and make decisions on several items. The first of these items is which examinations will result at the end of the process. Previous committees have opted to write only a comprehensive examination, or a suite of examinations in thermodynamics, dynamics, and quantum mechanics. A second question is how many questions are needed for each examination, and if the multiple choice format is used, how many responses will be used for each question. For example, the committee writing the 2000 set of examinations chose 40 questions with four responses, while the committee for the 2006 set chose 50 questions with four responses. This decision becomes important because it defines the number of questions that need to be written. 

He was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 1985, and he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, and a research fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum (Sciences Center) Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Social Research, Cologne. He has been a member of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management and panels of the Committee on Human Factors and the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. He served on the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, Department of Energy, and chaired its Task Eorce on Radioactive Waste Management, examining questions of institutional trustworthiness. He was a member of the National Research Council s panel on Human Eactors in Air Traffic Control Automation and the Technical Review Committee for the Nuclear Materials Technology Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

Each new edition of a Subject Test is developed by a committee of examiners composed of professors in the subject who are on undergraduate and graduate faculties in different types of institutions and in different regions of the United States and Canada. In selecting members for each committee, the GRE Program seeks the advice of the appropriate professional associations in the subject... 

Within the United Kingdom, Bell was well known amongst carbohydrate chemists. He was a meticulous examiner of Ph. D. theses, as some candidates found to their dismay, and an active member of the British Carbohydrate Nomenclature Committee, where he had a particular interest in branched-chain sugars. He served as a member of the Publications Committee of The Chemical Society from 1951-1955, and as Senior Reporter for the biochemistry section of the Annual Reports of The Chemical Society. He frequently travelled to Europe, notably to the foreign meetings of the Society for Experimental Biology, and he particularly valued his contacts with the carbohydrate biochemists at the Institut Pasteur. 

In 1939 the graduate plan of study included 18 courses and two foreign languages. However, there were neither qualifying examinations for admission to the Ph.D. program, nor preliminary examinations, only a Ph.D. thesis defense for which a faculty committee of six or more was required. It was only in 1949 that the number of faculty members of a thesis committee was reduced to three, and only in 1953 that C.O. Bennett, J.M. Smith and H.C. Van Ness demanded the institution of qualifying examinations as a method of screening the students who wished to perform a Ph.D. thesis. 

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