Changing the Culture of Assessment: Moving from Bureaucratic to Clan Control

Abstract

Many business schools adopted assessment plans under pressure from accreditors and university-level administration. With external forces causing the adoption of assessment practices, many faculty and business school administrators perfunctorily created student learning outcomes and data collection mechanisms that satisfied the basic requirements for assessment or assurance of learning (AoL). However, often faculty and administrators do not embrace the possibilities embodied in the AoL processes. Rather than view assessment as a catalyst for transformational change that benefits student learning, assessment has become a burden completed by rote that fails to achieve the goals of an AoL system. This approach toward assessment provides the outcomes required by accreditation bodies, but also presents a number of drawbacks inherent to bureaucratic control processes. In this paper, I describe how assessment functions as a control process and outline how it has taken on the characteristics of a bureaucratic cont...