Jeff Olson

Jeff Olson leads College Board Technology, including software engineering, architecture, design, data science, infrastructure, and information security. Becoming CIO just prior to covid-19, Jeff led the engineering of systems for digital assessment during the pandemic, culminating in the Bluebook assessment platform that now supports the two largest digital assessments: the SAT Suite and Advanced Placement Exams. 

Prior to becoming CIO, Jeff served as chief data officer and SVP of Technology Strategy. In 2016 he formed College Board’s 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 the College Board’s data science practice and helped shape the introduction of Official SAT Practice 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 and led development of first-generation handheld learning applications. He later led experiments in digital textbooks on hardware devices for law school and medical school students. He developed software platforms for item authoring, global course scheduling, and assessing and improving teacher quality. He led both the Newsweek College Catalog survey and a decade-long study of admissions offices in 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 review course, used by students worldwide. 

Jeff fell in love with programming software 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.