Head of School Raynard Kington and Roblox Vice President Sean P. Buckley played Roblox at All-School Meeting.
Andover invited Sean P. “Jack” Buckley, Vice President of People at Roblox, to engage in a fireside chat with Head of School Raynard Kington during last Friday’s All-School Meeting (ASM). Drawing on his work with educational assessments, namely the SAT, Buckley discussed the future of standardized testing, and the use of game-based assessments to evaluate talent in professional settings.
Prior to joining Roblox, Buckley had a diverse career path, ranging from working in the U.S. Navy as a security officer to helping lead the redesign of the SAT as Vice President of Research on The College Board. A central focus of the ASM conversation was the thought process behind improving student achievement by making job and college evaluations more equitable. Buckley elaborated on the challenges of making standardized testing as accurate and fair as possible.
“What I like to say and truly believe is that selecting people for a job or college with a standardized test is the worst way to select them, except for all the other ways. I say that because when you get rid of them, most of the other systems that people invent are not more fair. You lose the ability to even monitor them. Inevitably, people reinvent them. The more you really dig into the research of using standardized assessments correctly, you can’t find a better way to make a system more fair. You know you can’t fix something if you don’t measure it. You just have to be honest about what you’re finding,” said Buckley.
Janice Wong ’27 found Buckley’s advice insightful, emphasizing how it offered an in-depth perspective on standardized assessments like the SAT.
“I really liked the SAT talk and the thoughts [behind] how the SAT is formatted and the process behind it. I feel like it helps students understand the importance of the SAT and why colleges do it in the first place. However, the questions that Dr. Kington [chooses] should be more related to the student body,” said Wong.
Buckley presented an example of Roblox’s recruitment platform for Kington and students to interact with on the Cochran Chapel’s big screen. Vivien Valckx ’28, who volunteered for the demonstration, noted how this was vastly different from other ASMs.
“Something that stood out to me was probably how they actually got Dr. Kington to play the game instead of just talking about it. They kept us all engaged. It was a more active ASM, [and] people were genuinely interested. It wasn’t just someone talking for an hour and a half. There was audience participation too, as I got to go and play Roblox,” said Valckx.
Reflecting on the ASM, Alberto Agudo Diéguez noted the potential of the fireside chat to spark thoughtful dialogue on campus. Although the ASM seemed more like an interview than a conversation for him, Agudo Diéguez underscored the value of this model as a way to challenge different perspectives in pertinent topics.
“This fireside chat model is really nice and has a lot of potential if we actually spark conversations where the two people are sharing their different perspectives. It helps us if Dr. Kington is with another person, and as students, having two different perspectives on stage of two people that we look up to. It sparks our thoughts. I believe that if we actually engaged in this chat, if it were sharing different perspectives, which I’ve seen and it’s super interesting, it would be really nice,” said Agudo Diéguez.
