Innovative assessment and grading practices in higher education: A critical exploration for management educators

Innovative assessment and grading practices in higher education: A critical exploration for management educators — The paper argues that Assessment and grading are among the most influential factors shaping learning in Higher Ed, yet traditional, summative-heavy and norm-referenced approaches undermine deep learning, well-being, equity, and academic integrity in the generative AI era. Synthesizing the wider higher-education literature, it identifies five innovative practices aligned with the "assessment for learning" (Formative Assessment) paradigm — authentic assessment, self- and peer-assessment, reassessment, standards-based grading, and ungrading — and reviews their uptake across 58 articles from four leading management education journals. It finds self- and peer-assessment dominate that discourse while the other practices remain marginal, and urges management educators to engage more actively and reciprocally with assessment and grading innovation.

Key Findings

• Assessment and grading are under-researched in management education. Only 58 assessment-related articles appeared over 20 years across AMLE, JME, Management Learning, and IJME (roughly three per year), many concentrated in 2010 and 2014 special issues — a modest footprint given assessment's central role in shaping learning.
• Traditional practices are critiqued on multiple fronts. Conventional, summative, norm-referenced grading encourages superficial, fragmented learning; provides students little control or transparency; harms intrinsic Motivation; fuels stress and anxiety; and perpetuates inequities — while largely assessing recall rather than real-world application.
• The guiding vision is "assessment for learning." Drawing on Sambell et al., the authors frame formative, ongoing, and individualized Feedback as an overarching philosophy rather than a toolkit, balancing formative with summative purposes and foregrounding student agency, self-regulation, and metacognitive skill.
• Five innovative practices are proposed as mutually reinforcing. The selected set integrates assessment-focused innovations (authentic assessment, self- and peer-assessment, reassessment) with grading-focused ones (standards-based grading and ungrading), chosen for pedagogical validity, strategic relevance to current challenges, practical feasibility, and complementarity.
• Uptake is highly uneven in management education. Self- and peer-assessment are extensively studied and used (nearly half the reviewed corpus), chiefly for summative evaluation of group work; authentic assessment appears mainly via technology-mediated simulations and is often conflated with experiential learning; while reassessment, standards-based grading, and ungrading are virtually absent.
• The gap is partly a matter of language and culture. Many management educators already use experiential and team-based activities that overlap with authentic assessment, but without that terminology; meanwhile norm-referenced "grading on a curve," external signaling (rankings, internships, accreditation), and students' instrumental mindset create normative barriers to mastery-oriented and gradeless approaches.
• Authentic assessment is especially well-suited to management education. Tasks mirroring real professional problems (live consulting projects, dashboards with executive briefings) align with the field's practice-oriented, employability focus and can support inclusive, integrity-preserving alternatives to exam-centered assessment in the GenAI era.
• Implementation demands institutional and cultural support. Change is resisted by instructors and students alike; the authors recommend incremental experimentation (e.g., ungraded assignments, reassessment for a single task, standards-based standards-based rubrics), program-level coordination, documented Scholarship of Teaching and Learning evidence, and dialogue spanning validity, assurance of learning, and stakeholders such as accreditation bodies and employers.

Connected Concepts

• Assessment
• Authentic Assessment
• Formative Assessment
• Summative Assessment
• Higher Ed
• Business Education
• Mastery Learning
• Feedback
• Academic Integrity

Connected Articles

• Drummond GenAI Business Schools Framework 2026 — GenAI and its implications for business-school assessment and learning
• Espino AI Business Education Review 2026 — Review of AI in business/management education
• Zhan Boud Du Authentic Assessment Scoping Review 2025 — Scoping review of authentic assessment
• Kofinas Generative AI Authentic Assessment Integrity 2025 — Authentic assessment and integrity in the generative AI era
• Aaiwa AI Authentic Assessment Metacognition 2026 — Authentic assessment and metacognition with AI
• Nicola Richmond Programwide Assessment GenAI 2025 — Program-wide assessment redesign under GenAI
• Dollinger Equitable Assessment AI 2026 — Equity and inclusive assessment with AI

Citation

Mesny, A., Roberge-Maltais, I., & Galy, A. (2026). Innovative assessment and grading practices in higher education: A critical exploration for management educators. The International Journal of Management Education, 24, 101307.