Abstract:

In the course of the past decade, quality assurance has become a major factor in higher education. The challenge to obtain accreditation, supported by appropriate assessment procedures, is now a high priority for more and more universities in emerging, as well as in developed, economies. For business schools, the accreditation provided by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) remains perhaps the most sought after global quality assurance program. This paper focuses on the successful efforts made at a university business school in the Gulf Region to develop an assessment tool to evaluate the business communication skills of undergraduate students as part of satisfying AACSB accreditation requirements. The testing of communication, as opposed to language, skills is notoriously complex and we describe our identification of constituent items that make up the corpus of knowledge that business students need to attain. We discuss our development of a testing instrument consisting of short cases and multiple choice questions and which reflects the learning process of knowledge, comprehension, and application. Our testing instrument acted as a valid indicator of the effectiveness of teaching and learning as well as a component of accreditation requirements. It illustrates how the required plotting and assessment of learning objectives can be accomplished.

Keywords:

AACSB, accreditation, quality assurance, business communication, assessment.