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New AACSB Standards Include 'Assurance of Learning' The new accreditation standards recently passed by AACSB International members further emphasize the organization's attention on assessment in management education. Of the 21 standards, seven are directed to assurance of learning. "This area represents one of the major sections vides that educator the opportunity to document his teach- ing process, observe his strengths and weaknesses, and make the necessary adjustments to improve. Accountability means that he can learn from the process without fearing short-term punishment. Once these two aspects of the "paranoia shift" are of the new standards," explains Milton Blood, AACSB International's managing director of accreditation servic- es. "We wanted to draw attention to the importance of assurance of learning by enhancing its role in our stan- dards for accreditation." The assurance of learning standards are not intended addressed, faculty will often participate in assessment with enthusiasm. The vast majority want to improve and often realize they need to change some aspect of their teaching. What they require are the tools to discover what that "some- thing" should be. As an institution moves into a culture of assessment, educators begin to feel invested in the process without feeling personally at risk. More important, they are excited about pinpointing specific areas to focus on to improve their teaching skills. to dictate an institution's offerings, explains Blood. Rather they encourage each school to determine the learning objectives that are most in line with its mission. This point is emphasized in AACSB's recently revised document titled Eligibility Standards for Business Accreditation. "Because of differences in mission, student population, employer population, and other circumstances, the pro- gram learning goals will differ from school to school. Every school should enunciate and measure its educa- tional goals," it reads. "Few characteristics of the school will be as important to stakeholders as knowing the accomplishment levels of the school's students when compared against the school's learning goals." Those who have worked to develop the new stan- for AACSB International, visit www.aacsb.edu/ accreditation/brc/standards-4-25.pdf. AACSB also hosts assessment seminars featuring presenters with firsthand experience in putting assurance of learning practices into place. 32 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2003 age schools to give heightened attention to defining and assessing the learning goals they have for their degree programs." To read more about the new accreditation standards dards believe that accreditation is not the most important reason for schools to begin to focus on assessment, Blood points out. More important are the learning achievements of their students and the continuous improvement of their faculty. Blood adds, "These new standards certainly encour- Ask the Right Questions Building an assessment culture is less about engaging in "scientific" measurement and more about determining the most important questions to ask. If educators ask too many questions, they'll be overwhelmed; too few, and they won't have an appropriate basis for assessment. Therefore, it's up to educators to establish a set of core questions—five or ten, perhaps—that reflects their perceptions of where problems may lie. Institutions can also make the mistake of being overly pre- cise with their measurement, looking only for "statistically significant differences." This may be more sophisticated than the type of information that a school most needs to discov- er. Assessment results do not need to be reported to the hun- dredth decimal place. Rather, they need to have, as one of my professors used to say, "interocular significance." That is, they need to produce data that hits educators right between the eyes. Most important, embedded assessments can involve stu- dents in the process in a myriad of ways. Assessments can be contained not only in quizzes and exams, but also in highly interactive, project-based assignments. For instance, Miami University of Ohio runs an interdisciplinary program in which students from the business school, school of graphic design, and school of communications work in teams to respond to RFPs from real companies about designing a marketing campaign. What is the embedded assessment in such an assignment? It's whether or not the company buys the campaign. Although companies may not choose to pur- chase the campaign each time, if the work students produce is consistently rejected, the school will know it needs to tweak its offerings to improve their students' skills.