Just recently one of the institutions I work for started an innovative MBA program that is based on competencies. Essentially, a competencies assessment is performed before taking any specific courses in the program in order to assess knowledge and skills of the student against the expected knowledge and skills of an MBA graduate. This assessment, up to a certain degree, allows for students to get constructive credit for some courses based upon their previous knowledge and experience. This allows students to complete an MBA program and less than the traditional time of two years.
However, the success or failure of the program is based upon prior assessments or more specifically on how authentic assessment is performed. The institution’s ability to reliably and validly present a series of tasks with meaningful application to assess how well the student can synthesize and demonstrate competencies from various basic courses is crucial to the success of this program. If the rubrics are too much oriented towards course content the amount of students being able to pass these courses based on their competencies could be very limited. On the other hand, if rubrics are focused too much on real-world problems and situations quite distant from Course and program objectives, the institution could be awarding unwarranted credit.
Since this is a relatively new program it does not benefit yet from the inputs are feedback from the students. Does anyone have any ideas on how to instill the first round of validity and reliability to a competency based assessment?
