Applying the Capability Maturity Model to Assurance of Learning

INTRODUCTION The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) is an international accrediting organization that reviews business schools' ability to provide quality programs. Accreditation is voluntary and includes self-evaluations, peer-reviews, committee reviews, as well as evaluations of strategic plans, mission statements, faculty qualifications, and curriculum. AACSB was established in 1916 as an organization where business schools could network and address issues affecting business education. Accreditation standards were developed in 1919 and often revised to support continuous improvement in college or university-level education. Many schools seek or maintain accreditation as way of promoting rigor, quality, and relevance in business education. AACSB standards are used to evaluate an institution's mission, operations, faculty qualifications and contributions, and programs to assure various stakeholders of a quality education (Association to Advance Collegiate School of Business, 2013). Accreditation has many benefits not only to institutions and students, but also as an opportunity to increase a country's wealth (Kiger, 2002). In addition, many students are interested in investing in an education that is more tangible, marketable, and personally satisfying and are therefore more interested in the quality and potential payback from their educational commitments (Dealtry, 2003). AACSB International has over 1,300 member institutions in over 70 countries; however, only 650 member institutions hold AACSB accreditation (membership does not include accreditation). This represents approximately 6 percent of all undergraduate programs and only 4 percent of all master's and doctoral programs. AACSB also maintains a comprehensive database on current business school enrollments, programs, faculty, operations, students, and financial information that it makes available to its members. This information can be useful for schools and institutions interested in benchmarking their programs (AACSB, 2013). Assurance of Learning (AoL) is an approach for the continuous improvement of curriculum development, program review, and, in many cases, accreditation. AoL programs are important for assessing undergraduate, masters, and/or doctoral degree programs, their maturity, and impact on curriculum management. A recent mandate from AACSB is that accredited and accredit-seeking institutions must have mature AoL processes in place. Therefore, this paper describes the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and its application to assess the maturity and capability of AoL processes. In 1986, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a federally funded research development center at Carnegie Mellon University, developed a Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to assess and evaluate the capability and maturity of software development processes. This model was chosen because it provides an evolutionary path that focuses on five levels of process maturity: Level 1--Initial, Level 2--Repeatable, Level 3--Defined, Level 4--Managed, and Level 5--Optimizing. Each level requires a number of defined steps to provide a path for incremental and continued process improvement. In addition, this model allows an organization to assess its current level of software process maturity and then help it to prioritize the improvement efforts to reach the next higher level. Although the CMM was developed with software development processes in mind, subsequent models have been proposed so not to be limited to a specific discipline. Subsequently, the CMM provided a basis for the Capability Maturity Model Initiative (CMMI) in 1991 that combines several models into a single framework to improve all types of processes across different organizations (Bush & Dunaway, 2005). The objective of this paper is to provide a more thorough discussion of the CMM and describe how it can be applied to AoL projects in order to assess, plan, and improve a business school's AoL capability, performance, and maturity. …