William Sanders

William L. Sanders (26 April 1942—16 March 2017) was an American statistician, a senior research fellow with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He developed the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS), also known as the Educational Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), a method for measuring a teacher's effect on student performance by tracking the progress of students against themselves over the course of their school career with their assignment to various teachers' classes. Life Sanders was born in 1942 in Shelbyville, Tennessee and received a bachelor of science degree in animal science (1964) and a doctorate in statistics and quantitative genetics (1968) from the University of Tennessee. From 1972 to 2000, Sanders was a statistical consultant for the Institute of Agricultural Research, which is part of the UT system; he also was an adjunct professor in the school's College of Business. Sanders left the university to join the SAS Institute. In 2015, Sanders was awarded the James Bryant Conant Award. He died on 16 March 2017 at the age of 74.