Emancipating Assessment: Assessment Assumptions and Critical Alternatives in an Experience-based Programme

Abstract

This article aims to make a contribution to management education by proposing a critical alternative to assessment on experience-based programmes that has emerged from a study of an MBA programme based on action learning principles. The article discusses the programme's learning and assessment design and students' responses to their learning experience. It analyses elements forming the MBA design, including Revans' action learning model and Kolb's learning cycle, as well as its assessment procedures, to put into context a discussion of learners' responses to these pedagogies. The article concludes by suggesting how a critical perspective might be introduced through the adaptation of collaborative assessment methods, currently more common in adult and professional education. This would lead to a repositioning of the student's experience in which the experience of the MBA itself becomes a source for knowledge. The article ends with the suggestion that `being assessed' could form the basis of an experientially based examination of a practice of institutional power.