Jeff Olson

Jeff Olson leads College Board Technology, including software engineering, architecture, design, data science, infrastructure, and information security. Jeff became Chief Technology Officer (CTO) just before the pandemic and led the engineering of systems for the digital assessment, culminating in the Bluebook assessment platform that now supports the two largest digital assessments: the SAT Suite and Advanced Placement® Exams. 

In 2024, Jeff took a six-month leave of absence from College Board to serve as Acting CTO for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) at the U.S. Department of Education, where he led technology and product to successfully stabilize the program.

Prior to becoming CTO, Jeff served as chief data officer and SVP of Technology Strategy. In 2016, he formed the College Board Data and Technology Architecture (DATA) team to lead the transition to cloud-native and primarily serverless architectures, then discussed this transformation on the AWS Podcast in 2019. Previously, Jeff founded College Board's data science practice and helped shape the introduction of Official SAT Prep in collaboration with Khan Academy®.

Before joining College Board, Jeff built new educational products at Kaplan Test Prep. He participated in the creation of the earliest online courses, led development of first-generation handheld learning applications, and later led experiments in digital textbooks on hardware devices for law school and medical school students. He also developed software platforms for item authoring, global course scheduling, and assessing and improving teacher quality, and led both the Kaplan/Newsweek College Catalog survey and a decade-long study of how admissions offices adapted to the changing technology landscape. As an independent data science consultant, Jeff served a diverse clientele spanning the consumer packaged goods, music, retail, and nonprofit sectors.

Jeff started his career teaching physics, chemistry, and biology to students preparing for graduate school entrance exams and was a lecturer in biology at George Mason University. He coauthored, edited, and taught Kaplan's MCAT video review course, used by students worldwide.

Jeff fell in love with programming as a child on the TI-99/4A. He was educated at William & Mary and attended medical school for a year before accepting a job in education technology.