AACSB Accreditation: Towards Assurance of Learning Best Practices for the 5th Year Maintenance Report

The 5Th Year Maintenance Report is the singular most important document for schools seeking to maintain accreditation with and by AACSB International — The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. All 655 AACSB accredited business programs in 44 countries as of July 2012 will submit such a report at some 5-year interval in order to maintain AACSB accreditation. The Assurance of Learning (AoL) Standards (15 through 21) are critical to this AACSB process. This paper is based largely on the experience of one AACSB-accredited College of Business in the Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) in the U.S.A. The school has held continuous AACSB accreditation since 1976 at the undergraduate business level, and since 1981 at the MBA level. As its notable contribution, the paper advances some best practices by asking and addressing four key AoL questions, namely: (a) On curriculum development, what major curricula revisions have occurred since the school’s 2008 successful maintenance review? What factors led to these revisions? (b) On assessment tools and procedures: what are the learning goals for each undergraduate and graduate program, including the online and satellite versions of these programs? (c) What AoL results and outcomes have been used to demonstrate progress towards achievement of the school’s mission as part of the “Closing the Loop” AoL continuous improvement paradigm? (d) What is the role of indirect assessments in the accreditation process?