Bob Mislevy and Assessment as an Enabling Technology in the Digital Revolution

This paper traces more than a decade of collaboration between Bob Mislevy and Cisco, documenting his pivotal role in transforming educational assessment during the emerging digital revolution (2000–2014). The Cisco Networking Academy Program, serving millions of students globally, became the first large‐scale implementation of Evidence Centered Design (ECD) and a proving ground for his ideas. Five innovations are described: (a) application of ECD to a global assessment ecosystem; (b) NetPASS, a pioneering system for automated performance assessment using Bayesian inference networks; (c) integration of assessment into the Packet Tracer simulation platform; and (d) extensions to game‐based assessment through projects like SimCityEDU, and (e) broad impacts of the ECD logic on software development in general. The paper illustrates how Mislevy contributed to a paradigm shift from technology‐enhanced assessment to assessment‐enhanced technology and concludes with reflections on the intellectual and personal qualities that distinguished his contributions, including his integration of epistemological rigor with practical problem‐solving and his concern for the social impacts of assessment.