Standard 5: Built for Distinction, Not Conformity

• AACSB Standard 5 presents schools with one of the most flexible and mission-driven opportunities in the accreditation process to demonstrate what makes a business school distinctive.
• Schools that treat assurance of learning as a compliance exercise often produce assessment processes that are interchangeable with those of any other institution.
• Distinctive AoL practices emerge when learning outcomes, assessment methods, and stakeholder involvement are intentionally shaped by a school’s mission, context, and purpose.

 
What do you want your school to be known for?

When you step down as dean or accreditation director, when your term ends, when peer schools describe your program, what will they say? Will they say, “The faculty stayed out of trouble”? Or “They built something unmistakably theirs”?

Here is what many schools are missing: Standard 5 of the AACSB Business Accreditation Standards, which focuses on assurance of learning (AoL), offers one of the clearest pathways for demonstrating what makes your school distinctive. Yet, schools rarely leverage it for that purpose. Most schools treat Standard 5 as a compliance hurdle and a checkbox item, when it is actually the widest-open door in the entire accreditation process for showcasing your school’s unique strengths.

In other words, rather than fulfilling Standard 5 by merely scrambling to ensure that your school has its required documentation in order, you should be viewing it as an opportunity to discover a crown jewel in your AoL process.

Why Standard 5 Is Different

Standard 5 is not merely about whether your students are learning. In poker, that bare-minimum interpretation would be considered mere “table stakes.” Rather, because this standard is principles-based rather than prescriptive, it also is about demonstrating whether your students are thriving at the intersection of your curriculum and pedagogy. It’s about showing that they are learning in ways that can happen only through a combination of your faculty, your mission, and your context.

AACSB’s accreditation standards invite schools to demonstrate distinction, and distinction does not mean being different for difference’s sake. It means being recognizable. It means that when someone looks at what you are doing, they recognize your school’s unique identity and purpose.

The standard does not tell you what competencies to assess or how to assess them. Instead, it asks you to define competencies that are consonant with your mission, strategies, and expected outcomes; it is intended to help you move toward what you want your school to be. As your peer review team evaluates your work toward Standard 5, its members will trust you to know what matters for your students in your context.

Distinction does not mean being different for difference’s sake. It means that when someone looks at what you are doing, they recognize your school’s unique identity and purpose.

This design is intentional. As AACSB’s Blue Ribbon Committee shaped the 2020 standards, its members confronted a persistent frustration: AoL had become more of a reporting exercise than a demonstration that distinctive approaches produce distinctive results.

With this in mind, AACSB redesigned the standard to make a connection to mission foundational rather than optional. The association’s guidance explicitly warns against treating AoL as an exercise of compliance. It emphasizes that what defines excellence is not complexity or frequency of assessment, but rather a systematic process that is informed by mission and that leads to meaningful improvements in learning.

In other words, AACSB built us a runway to distinction—and yet, in our discussions with colleagues and our reviews of AoL approaches at a range of institutions, we have discovered that many schools write competencies using generic language that could appear in any other business school's report. In other words, schools too often respond to the standard by demonstrating conformity.  

What Unremarkable Looks Like

We have found that institutions that pursue compliance over distinction often take the following missteps:

• They use language in their learning goals that could appear in any business school’s report—phrases such as communicate effectively, think critically, demonstrate ethical reasoning, or work well in teams.
• They require program-level competencies listed on every course syllabus, even though the standard does not make this step a requirement. In addition, they assess the course-level objectives and aggregate the results into program-level percentages, turning assessment into a spreadsheet exercise rather than an examination into whether students demonstrate desired competencies across the program.
• They mention their mission statements in the introductory paragraph of their AoL documentation but those statements never surface again. We could search their emails and faculty meeting minutes related to AoL from the past year, only to find that their missions were mentioned rarely or never. That absence of mission in their written communications is further evidence that they are prioritizing compliance, not strategy.
• They assign one person or a small committee to design all their assessments, interpret all results, and write all reports. As a result, their assessment methods do not reflect anything distinctive about their pedagogy, students, location, or purpose, because no one person can have the knowledge necessary to achieve this in all courses.
• They select courses for AoL assessments that are “safe” options and rarely incorporate innovative teaching approaches.

To be clear, these efforts are still hard work. But they are not signs of rigor. These actions rob every course of the opportunity to be distinctive and result in AoL processes that could be transferred wholesale to any other business school with a simple find-and-replace to substitute a different institution’s name. They are signs that schools are working hard to demonstrate they are unremarkable.

What Distinction Actually Requires

Distinction, on the other hand, reveals itself when the same learning outcome manifests in radically different ways depending on your mission. Every school should create its own model, listing each competency it wants to assess (related to areas such as communication, data-driven decision-making, entrepreneurship, or leadership, for example). Then, it should determine its learning goals for that competency and the assessment method its faculty will use to assure student learning for each goal.

Consider a business school in Appalachia with a mission explicitly focused on regional economic revitalization in communities experiencing postindustrial decline. Faculty at this school started with a vanilla competency: Students will demonstrate effective written and oral communication skills appropriate for business contexts. Assessment consisted of class presentations evaluated by faculty using generic rubrics.

But as faculty worked to tie the learning objective more tightly to their school’s strengths, they asked a more useful question: “Our students will work with family-owned businesses that have been operating for three generations, economic development authorities that are trying to attract new industry, and community members who are skeptical of suits from the university. What does effective communication actually mean in that context?”

When they looked at program-level competencies from this angle, the desired learning outcome transformed: Students will translate formal financial concepts into actionable guidance for business owners whose deep operational expertise comes from running their businesses rather than from going to business school.

A school’s mission should not be confined to an introductory paragraph in its AoL report. It should be in the DNA of what the school’s faculty assess and how they assess it.

The assessment transformed, too. Students now develop investor pitch materials for regional small businesses seeking expansion capital and create plain-language guidance for business owners to use in ongoing operations. A panel of regional small business owners, economic development officers, and community bank loan officers now evaluate student performance, using criteria that include not just technical accuracy but cultural competency, clarity for all stakeholders, and effectiveness in helping businesses move forward.

This change did not emerge from one faculty member or AoL director working in isolation. Members of the school’s faculty met with regional business owners and economic development professionals to ask this question: “What communication failures do you see when our graduates work in this region?” Through these conversations, the school discovered that graduates could write elegant reports but could not explain a cash flow projection to someone who had run their business by instinct for 30 years.

When people this school’s AoL report, they immediately recognize an institution that knows whom it serves and what its region needs. The mission is not confined to an introductory paragraph. It is in the DNA of what the school’s faculty assess and how they assess it.

Other Mission-Distinctive Approaches

The same approach works for any mission-specific competency that schools want to define and assess. Contrast the example above with a school devoted to technological innovation. Its mission-distinctive learning goal might be the following: Students will translate technical innovations into compelling market narratives for nontechnical investors, demonstrating the ability to make complex engineering concepts accessible while generating stakeholder buy-in. This school could ask panels of venture capitalists and startup founders to assess student pitch presentations based on their accuracy and ability to make complexity clear and compelling.

A school whose mission focuses on entrepreneurship and supporting a startup ecosystem might develop this outcome: Students will adapt their communication of business models and market validation as ventures evolve, demonstrating the ability to craft stage-appropriate narratives from customer discovery through fundraising. The school might ask entrepreneurs-in-residence to evaluate students on their ability to tell compelling stories backed by evidence.

What if a school wants to assess its students’ ethical leadership? It could be satisfied with a vanilla version of this competency: Students will demonstrate ethical reasoning and decision-making in business contexts.

But if its mission emphasizes social enterprise and sustainability, its goal could read: Students will manage tensions between financial viability and social mission, demonstrating the ability to make decisions that advance impact without compromising sustainability or engage stakeholders authentically when priorities conflict. Students could be assessed by how well they demonstrate an understanding of stakeholder accountability and mission-profit integration as they make presentations to social enterprise advisors.

Using Standard 5 to full advantage is not about inventing competencies that no one else has. It is about recognizing that when your students learn to communicate or analyze data or lead ethically, they are learning these skills in specific contexts, for specific purposes, with specific stakeholders.

That specificity is where your distinction lives. You already chose what you want to be known for. Standard 5 is where you prove it.

A Blueprint for Becoming Distinctive

To use Standard 5 to its fullest potential, schools can start by examining their missions and strengths carefully. Then, they can follow this four-part blueprint to refine their AoL processes:

1. Put mission in the room, literally. Where does your mission appear in AoL discussions? If it is only in the written report’s introduction, it is decorative, not directive. Start every AoL meeting with your mission statement and use it as a constant reference point. At each stage, ask: “How does this assessment decision reflect who we are?”

2. Reverse-engineer from context. Who are your students? Where do they work after graduation? What problems do they solve? What makes your regional ecosystem, industry partnerships, or pedagogical approach distinctive? Your AoL process should emerge from these realities, not from a workshop on assessment design.

Standard 5 is where curriculum, faculty expertise, student characteristics, and institutional context converge into something recognizable as uniquely yours.

3. Seek stakeholder validation. Are you assessing what matters to your employers, your community, and your ecosystem? Invite your stakeholders to contribute to this process, not just so they can inform your competencies but so they can participate in student evaluations. If your external stakeholders cannot tell your school’s AoL process from any other school’s, neither can anyone else.

4. Apply the recognition test. If you removed your school’s name from your AoL documentation, would someone still recognize this as your program? If the answer is no, you are demonstrating compliance, not distinction.

Standard 5 Is Built for Distinction—Use It That Way

This standard is your strategic advantage. It is the place in your accreditation process where you get to show, not just tell, what makes your school distinctive. It is where curriculum, faculty expertise, student characteristics, and institutional context converge into something recognizable as uniquely yours.

That is distinction. That is what the standard enables. That is what your school deserves. With that in mind, we encourage you to take these actions as soon as possible:

Tomorrow: Remove your school’s name from your AoL documentation. Hand it to a colleague at another institution and ask, “Whose school is this?” If your colleague cannot tell that it’s your school, that is your first indication that you are not using Standard 5 as a path to distinction.

Later this week: Convene three people—a faculty member who teaches a core course, an employer who hires your graduates, and your AoL director. Ask them one question: “What should someone immediately recognize about our students that they would not see anywhere else?” Then, look at your program competencies. Do they reflect those answers?

If they do not, you have work to do.