Blue Ribbon Committee on Accreditation Quality (BRC) Report

The Blue Ribbon Committee on Accreditation Quality (BRC) is pleased to report excellent progress towards achieving the charge of reviewing and recommending changes to accreditation. This report is to inform the membership about the process to date, describe next steps, and provide a high level introduction to the working draft standards.

The BRC Process: Deep Member Engagement and Communication

Designed to engage accredited and members schools deeply and continuously, the BRC plan has been executed as planned. More than 2,000 people participated in meetings about the BRC in its first year. Members contributed to early BRC efforts to understand and prioritize the emerging issues and challenges facing business schools. Initial directions were set by the BRC and further developed in additional meetings with members. By the April 2012, overall directions were translated into initial working draft standards, which again have been used to engage members in discussions at a number of major events, including the AACSB International Conference and Annual Meeting in San Diego.

The work of the BRC was supported by a Subcommittee on Executive (Non-Degree) Education and a Task Force on Distance/Online Education. Both groups crystallized the challenges in their respective areas—even identifying crucial points of overlap—and made detailed recommendations, which have been incorporated into the current draft standards. Previous AACSB task forces, including those addressing impact of research and globalization, also played a major role in the BRC.

Following the release of the Exposure Draft Standards, the Annual Accreditation Conference (September 23–25, 2012) has been structured to facilitate deep coverage of the proposed changes. Bracketed by the opening and closing general sessions on the subject, six concurrent sessions led by BRC members will focus on specific segments of the exposure draft. Members of the BRC will also facilitate sessions about the exposure draft at U.S. and regional meetings, and there will be focus groups at regular meetings.

In addition to ongoing member engagement, a series of articles will appear in AACSB's eNEWSLINE. These articles will discuss specific areas of the draft standards, seeking to explain and explore the main drivers and implications for business schools. The March/April BizEd will focus on the future of accreditation and feature the work of the BRC. The issue presents a valuable opportunity to inform members just prior to the vote scheduled for April 8, 2013. To view a complete list of events with BRC discussion visit: www.aacsb.edu/brc/events.asp.

The Exposure Draft Standards: Innovation; Impact; and Engagement

The full Exposure Draft Standards (referred to as the "Standards" below) are available to the membership via the AACSB Exchange: brc.aacsb.edu. This section provides an introduction to the overall themes and directions and draws attention to specific changes being proposed.

The Standards reinforce long-held AACSB commitments to mission focus, peer review and judgment, and scholarship.

The Standards build on the mission-focus established two decades ago, recognizing that there are many approaches to quality management and that diversity ought to be encouraged. To continue fostering diversity, the BRC believes it important to emphasize and support peer-review and judgment. Standards should provide guidance about the bases for judgment and what to look for in terms of quality, but should not mandate specific practices and metrics.

The BRC also believes that, more than ever, it is important to maintain AACSB's commitment to scholarship. Business schools have come a long way to be accepted for academic rigor in university settings—we must continue to build academic credibility moving forward.

The Standards are designed to be more focused, flexible, and relevant for business schools now and in the future.

At 15 standards, compared to the 21 in the current standards, the working draft is leaner and more focused on the areas that matter most. The bases for judgment are more concise and expectations for documentation are more flexible and less burdensome. A tighter set of standards is achieved by ensuring that each standard is more relevant to the current and future needs of business schools and business and by eliminating redundancy. There still is more work to be done to achieve these objectives fully and the BRC is looking forward to member suggestions.

Despite being leaner, the Standards are "more complete" than the current standards in that they are designed to provide guidance over the full breadth of areas viewed as important for quality. The Standards avoid relying too heavily on a small set of requirements and metrics to gauge quality—something that accreditation has been criticized for doing in recent years.

The Standards are designed to support business schools and business in an environment that is increasingly international, competitive, and dynamic with respect to technologies.

Ultimately, accreditation serves business, as well as business schools. The Standards are designed with the objective of improving business and management practice in mind, as well as with the goal of supporting business school efforts to deliver high quality management education in a rapidly changing environment. As a consequence, the BRC believes accreditation must be designed to foster innovation, focus efforts on impact, and encourage deeper academic and professional engagement.

Innovation

Accreditation must not be an obstacle to innovation in management education. Indeed, the reality is that innovation must be encouraged in the emerging environment of higher education. This theme represents a fundamental challenge to accreditation, which historically has not encouraged risk taking and unconventional approaches.

To encourage innovation in business schools, the following changes are being proposed:

A. Placing a stronger emphasis on achieving a deep understanding of the school in first standard, which would broaden the definition of mission to address areas of distinctiveness, expectations for impact, and opportunities for innovation.

B. Emphasizing, in the financial strategies standard, not only whether the school can fund incremental improvement, but also whether the business/financial model can sustain quality and support innovation and change.

C. Including specific guidance for applying standards in the context of different and changing teaching/learning models. For example, faculty standards are designed to work together with the standard on professional staff to provide guidance about the "division of labor" supporting different teaching/learning models.

D. Designing learning and teaching standards to encourage innovation by putting assurance of learning into context as part of the curriculum management and improvement, being more explicit about the value of indirect assessments for collecting stakeholder feedback, and providing guidance about the fundamental attributes of quality curricula, such as student-faculty interaction and academic and professional engagement, that can drive innovation.

Impact

Accreditation must support schools to address calls to demonstrate accountability to constituents, adapt to changing expectations and technologies for research, and better understand and articulate their role in society. It is no longer enough to simply claim learning happens, research is useful, and the school makes a difference without evidence. To focus business school efforts more on impact, the following changes are being proposed:

A. Broadening the mission standard to develop a better understanding of the impact or difference a school intends to make in the business, social, and academic communities they serve.

B. Refocusing the Intellectual Contributions standard away from counting journal articles and reporting individual articles and more towards providing information at the school level and on encouraging intellectual contributions that impact of theory, practice, and/or teaching of business and management, with an emphasis on alignment with the mission of the school.

C. Building on initial AACSB successes in assessing whether learning objectives have been met, recasting assurance of learning (AOL) as part of curriculum management to provide a better context and encourage a broader, more holistic, understanding and demonstration of the impact of learning.

D. Encouraging more direct and explicit impacts on business and management practice by placing several related standards under a new section on academic and professional engagement.

Engagement—Academic and Professional

High quality management education and impactful research cannot be achieved without both academic and professional engagement. Accreditation standards should provide guidance about the appropriate balance and about the intersection of academic and professional engagement, as well encourage more of both. To achieve this, the BRC arranges three key criteria into a new section of the Standards titled Academic and Professional Engagement. The three standards in the section are designed to:

A. Raise the level of academic and professional engagement facilitated by the degree programs. The intent of this standard is not only to encourage more and deeper academic and professional engagement in degree program education, but also to foster more complementarities between academic learning and experiential learning activities.

B. Strengthen the role that executive education has in complementing degree education and research in business schools and in serving business constituents. This standard would apply only to schools that have significant involvement with executive education and focus on how executive education complements degree education and research and on the processes to ensure client satisfaction.

C. Fostering mission-focused faculty models that raise the level of academic scholarship and strengthen engagement with practice. With only a slight reframing of the current standard on faculty qualifications, accreditation will encourage for more realistic and mission-centric faculty portfolios and cultivate more integration of academic research and business practice.

The standards in the section on academic and professional engagement should not be viewed in isolation of other standards. For example, effective curriculum management is essential to ensure academic engagement by students, as well as to develop critical touch points with practice. Also, faculty academic and professional qualifications cannot be viewed in isolation of faculty deployment and the division of labor with professional staff. Similarly, as is the case in the current standards, executive education can be essential in the plans and financial strategies of a school.

It is worth noting that the directions articulated by the BRC are consistent with other strategic directions of the Board and AACSB. For example, AACSB is developing strategies for engaging business in efforts to achieve its mission.

Eligibility Criteria and Accreditation Processes

The BRC acknowledges the importance of accreditation procedures and processes in achieving innovation, impact, and engagement in business schools. One area of focus by the BRC has been on ensuring that there is clarity in the procedures and criteria related to Eligibility. The BRC is proposing two adjustments to the Eligibility Procedures and associated criteria:

A. Consistent with suggestions from members, the BRC recommends an approach that allows a choice regarding the scope of accreditation—whether it applies to institution or business school—and clarifies the conditions under which the choice can be made. The recommendation is based largely on current practice and provides more detailed guidelines to ensure consistency and value.

B. Eligibility criteria are now organized into two sections: General Criteria and Core Values. General criteria are designed to establish the foundation/context and readiness for review. The other criteria are designed to ensure that schools that are accredited are committed to the core values of AACSB, including collegiality, diversity, and ethical behavior (and, now, sustainability) in operations.

Finally, the BRC believes that fostering innovation, impact, and engagement requires more than changing the standards and eligibility criteria. It requires investing in the training of peer-review team members and business school leaders, and in changing the culture of accreditation. Its final recommendations to the Board and staff will address these opportunities as well as the accreditation standards.