Everett Franklin Lindquist

Everett Franklin Lindquist (June 4, 1901 – May 13, 1978) was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today.

He was also an early popularizer, and perhaps originator, of the inconsistent hybrid form of statistical hypothesis testing (mixing the incompatible approaches of Ronald Fisher and of Neyman–Pearson), in his textbook Statistical Analysis In Educational Research (1940). This approach, despite its fundamental flaws, has been extremely influential, and is now widespread in statistical applications and science.

Everett Franklin Lindquist was a native of Gowrie, Iowa. He was the son of Jonas A. Lindquist and Hannah O. Anderson.

Lindquist joined the University of Iowa in 1925 as a research assistant. He received his Ph.D. in 1927 and was a member of the Iowa faculty until retirement in 1969. In 1953 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Desiring to create an academic competition for Iowa students, he developed a set of tests in 1929. These evolved into the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, an exam for elementary and middle school students, as well as the Iowa Tests of Educational Development for high schoolers. Despite their name, they are used nationwide, especially since the enactment of No Child Left Behind legislation. Due to their success, he founded the not-for-profit Measurement Research Center on the Iowa campus to score these tests, which was later acquired by Westinghouse, NCS, and its present owner, Pearson PLC.

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