Marketplace Community Newsletter

Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 2005

Marketplace Helps WVU Meet AACSB Standards

For business programs and schools, accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business can be a time-consuming, laborious, but crucial process. Many organizations worldwide hold accreditation from the AACSB, and most major U.S. universities consider accreditation a must for their business programs.

The initial approval process for accreditation can take up to five years to complete, involving committees, meetings, plans, reviews, reports, more committees, more meetings, more plans, more reviews and more reports. Getting accredited is no small undertaking. Once you have it, you want to maintain it.

At West Virginia University, that's exactly what the Executive MBA Graduate Program is using Marketplace to do. Assistant Professor of Accounting Richard Riley says that before the new AACSB re-accreditation rules, the College was informally using Marketplace "to measure in a fairly objective manner whether the students have attained our programmatic goals."

Thus, when the ACCSB updated its requirements, institutions like WVU needed to demonstrate that students in their programs learned what they were supposed to have learned. Essentially, AACSB is asking colleges to provide objective metrics to demonstrate assurance of learning on the students' part.

AACSB accreditation standards. It takes a 77-page book, Eligibility Procedures and Accreditation Standards for Business Accreditation, to detail the AACSB's program for accreditation. The most salient of the learning experience expectations set forth in the AACSB standards and procedures appear to be
a) that considerable time be invested in contact between faculty and students and among students in "transformational learning" experiences,
b) that the learning be extremely interactive, and
c) that students actively participate in their own education.

Riley explains WVU's approach to the accreditation requirements by first noting that, with its recent standards' update, "the AACSB is now mission oriented. You have to document your mission as a college. Then you develop programs around the mission, and then you complete an assessment, i.e., an assurance around the programs to demonstrate that you've actually accomplished your mission." To meet AACSB standards for accreditation, colleges don't all have to do the same thing as long as they design programs acceptable to the AACSB and demonstrate that students achieve programmatic learning objectives.

In the case of WVU's EMBA program, two semesters ago, with WVU approaching its five-year accreditation review, the head of the program identified seven goals and objectives that accorded with AACSB's learning expectations and Riley, in concert with the Director of Graduate Programs Paul Speaker, was tasked with formally defining and documenting the EMBA Assurance of Learning. The result was that the College looked more carefully at what the college was already doing with Marketplace. Riley and Speaker found that the program already had the instrument it needed to measure and display learning in place - Marketplace.

West Virginia University's Assurance of Learning. As Riley puts it, "What we knew was that Marketplace was a wonderful tool that provides us with a comprehensive, integrative experience and what we realized is that Marketplace qualifies as an assurance of learning. "Students find that they can't do marketing and ignore the financial condition of the company; they can't do R&D or build huge factories unless they've done the demand projections that justify the capital outlay," Riley asserts. "Further, Marketplace compels students to understand and apply learning from different tracks within the college cross-functionally, rather than keeping knowledge and skills in discrete, functional silos."

What's more, Marketplace requires that students do this, Riley says, "in both a short-term environment, like what products you'll sell next quarter, and longer term, with strategic plans for the future, because, for instance, a factory takes more than one quarter to build. If you don't do demand projections for the long term, you may ultimately find yourself production-constrained." So Marketplace helps students learn to use their combined business skills in ways that are highly applicable to real-world business needs.

The integrative aspects of the Marketplace experience and the requirement for students to take both the short and long view is coupled with what Riley terms the "repetitive and periodic nature of Marketplace." Thus, through repetition and reinforcement over several simulation quarters, students gain an integrated understanding and an amalgamation of skills for developing, maintaining and improving strategic vision in a business environment.

Finally, the crowning detail of the WVU EMBA program's assurance of learning is outside participation and evaluation. Riley explains, "Not only do the students get this integrative experience, with periodic reinforcement of all learning points and the push to apply all this for short- and long-term strategic ends, but because we do the mock venture capital fair, we have outsiders evaluating our program and our students. These are businesspersons and business leaders from West Virginia who play the role of venture capitalists. They are the ones that evaluate whether the students have demonstrated the appropriate learning."

So at WVU, it's no longer only the professors who are determining whether the students have achieved the goals and objectives of the programs. It's the business leaders of the surrounding communities, people outside the program, evaluating the students. As Riley says, "The Marketplace provides a showcase of the students' learning environment so these evaluators can provide some assessment of student accomplishment. With outsiders looking over our shoulders, there's a higher level of assurance to the AACSB that these students have met the criteria that the college set down for them." Riley and Speaker documented all of this in a memo titled "Assurance of Learning, Executive MBA Graduate Program: Marketplace Business Simulation as the Assurance of Learning."

Riley and Speaker begin with an overview of Marketplace, then proceed to a course description and list of course objectives. The seven goals of the WVU EMBA assessment/assurance of learning exercise and the explanation of how Marketplace helps students achieve each goal comprise the main body of the document. Riley describes it this way: "I went through Marketplace, quarter by quarter, and identified the assurance of learning goals and objectives that were addressed as we moved through the simulation. The assurance of learning is a byproduct of showcasing our students to the business community; thus, we kill two birds with one stone, because we are confident the students are going to perform well in the mock venture capital fair and provide the business community with reasons for why they should hire them [the students]."

AACSB expectations and the WVU EMBA's Assurance of Learning. The Assurance of Learning instrument outlines the many tasks student teams must complete in an 8-quarter Marketplace simulation, and also explains the fundamental need for teamwork, and such ancillary learning content as the venture capital fair and shareholder communications and meetings. Riley's description of Marketplace as the capstone experience for the EMBA program follows.

[T]he Marketplace requires teams to utilize, fine-tune and build upon the skills developed in prior course work. Further, the Marketplace is an integrative experience where students get to apply their skills recognizing that while a plan of action has certain benefits it also has certain shortcomings and risks. Due to a continuing scarce resource problem (as is faced by all businesses), students must choose courses of action that they have analyzed and judged to likely be most effective; yet, those decisions inherently involved trade-offs. Finally, because the fundamental decisions remain constant from periods 3-8, the students get quick feedback on the results of their decisions and the ability to revisit (practice) those decisions in a repetitive nature.

That capstone description compares well with AACSB's expectation of an extensive time investment in transformational learning. As an excerpt from the AACSB's standards and procedures manual states:

To generate transformational learning both intensive and extensive learning experiences must take place, and that demands the investment of significant time in learning experiences. That time includes contact between students and faculty members, contact among students, and individual and personal engagement of students in learning and applying knowledge and skills.

The WVU outline and summation are very much in keeping with the spirit of the AACSB's learning expectations. That WVU EMBA students are expected to make a significant time investment, learning and applying knowledge and skills in a team environment, and that such investment results in intensive and extensive transformational educational experiences, is apparent from Riley's document.

The WVU EMBA Assurance of Learning statement also shows that the program meets the AACSB's expectation that learning be substantially interactive. The AACSB standards state:

The most effective learning is highly interactive, and schools are expected to show that such interactions take place as a normal part of the learning experience of students in degree programs.

The EMBA Assurance of Learning document notes that, through Marketplace:

[S]tudent teams must interact with outsiders through the venture capital fair (presentation and negotiations) and final presentations. In addition, the instructors have extensive one-on-one interaction with teams and team members throughout the exercise. As such, participation in the decision-making process and the ability to communicate those outcomes is paramount.

Finally, the AACSB expects students to be deeply involved in their own education. The standards manual puts it this way:

The most effective learning takes place when students are involved in their educational experiences.

In its overview of the Marketplace simulation, the WVU EMBA Assurance of Learning instrument makes clear that, to succeed, students must be highly motivated and thoroughly immersed in the learning experience:

Overall, Marketplace is a comprehensive/complex business simulation, an experiential learning tool. The business simulation requires participating teams to start and manage a personal computer manufacturing company from scratch in competition with other participating teams (fellow classmates). Student teams are expected to make all…decisions required to manage the business. Included in the process, participating teams must develop/write a business plan for their company and solicit and negotiate with venture capitalists for much needed growth capital. At the end of the exercise, participating teams report the results of their company's performance, including return on investment, customer satisfaction and market share to venture capitalist investors.

The forgoing indicates that West Virginia University's EMBA program does indeed provide assurance of learning. At Innovative Learning Solutions, we are honored to see Marketplace put to such progressive use. Professors Riley and Speaker's initiative could be modeled for the use of Marketplace in other programs. If you are interested in learning more about the WVU EMBA Assurance of Learning Program, Professor Riley invites you to contact him at 1-304-293-7849. If you are interested in exploring ways Marketplace might be integrated into assurance of learning programs, please contact us.

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Marketplace Community Newsletter, issued quarterly.